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3Lee  anto  SftepartJ  ^ublfgfjerg  Boston 


.WHITE    SLAVES 


OR 


THE     OPPEESSION    OF    THE 
WOETHY    POOE 


BY 


EEV.  LOUIS  ALBERT  BANKS,  D.D. 

AUTHOR  OF   "  THE  PEOPLE'S  CHRIST,"   ETC. 


BOSTON 
LEE    AND    SHEPARD    PUBLISHERS 

10    MILK    STREET 

1893 


GENERAL 


COPYRIGHT,  1891,  BY  LEE  AND  SHEPARD 


All  Rights  Reserved 


WHITE  SLAVES 


PBK88    OP 

Uckfoeil    anti    Cl 

JtOBTON- 


TO 

and 


WHO   INSTILLED    INTO    MY     MIND     AND    HEART,    IN    THE    DAYS    OF 

A    HAPPY    BOYHOOD,    THEIR    OWN    LOVE    FOR    LIBERTY 

AND    HATRED    OF    OPPRESSION, 

THIS    VOLUME   IS   GRATEFULLY  DEDICATED. 


164629 


To  THE  MERCY  AND  HELP  DEPARTMENT 
OF  THE  EPWORTH  LEAGUE 

MR.  EDISON  tells  us  that  ninety  per  cent 
of  the  energy  that  there  is  in  coal  is  lost  in 
the  present  method  of  converting  it  into  a 
usable  force.  May  I,  without  being  con- 
sidered a  croaker,  say  that  almost  the  same 
amount  of  spiritual  power  goes  to  waste  in 
our  average  church  life  ?  One  is  startled 
at  times  as  he  notes  the  manifestations  of 
fervor  and  warmth  in  the  devotional  meet- 
ings of  the  present  day,  and  the  meagre 
results  that  follow  in  the  transformation 
of  society  into  the  likeness  of  the  kingdom 
of  heaven.  Exactly  what  we  have  to  do, 
however,  is  to  help  hasten  the  answer  to 
the  prayer  our  Lord  taught  us,  "  Thy  will 
be  done  on  earth  as  it  is  in  heaven,"  and 
not  to  be  forever  seeking  to  build  taber- 
nacles on  some  Mount  of  Transfiguration. 


ii  INTRODUCTION 

This  book  of  Dr.  Banks' s  is  a  positive  stim- 
ulus to  this  work  of  social  transformation. 
The  young  men  and  women  of  our  Epworth 
League  could  not  do  better  than  to  care- 
fully and  thoughtfully  study  its  vivid  pic- 
tures of  every-day  scenes  in  our  great,  and 
even  in  our  lesser,  cities. 

Such  study  will  open  their  eyes  to  sad 
deformities  in  their  own  communities,  to 
which  too  many  have  become  strangely  in- 
different through  custom  and  wont.  True, 
it  is  not  pleasant  to  consider  these  distress- 
ing matters ;  but  is  it  the  business  of  the 
Christian  to  avoid  that  which  is  unpleas- 
ant ?  Consideration  leads  to  sympathy, 
and  sympathy  wonderfully  quickens  the 
inventive  faculties ;  and  the  aroused  intel- 
lect and  active  affection  are  leavening 
forces  that  alter  social  conditions  always 
for  the  better. 

I  take  great  pleasure,  therefore,  in  com- 
mending this  work,  because  it  stirs  all  who 
read  it.  It  may  make  you  indignant.  What 
of  it  ?  Would  that  more  were  alive  enough 
to  be  indignant  with  the  indignation  of  our 
Lord  at  the  forces  of  unbrotherliness  at 


INTRODUCTION  111 

work  in  our  midst !  It  will  do  more  than 
rouse  your  indignation ;  it  will  help  you 
to  utter  the  prayer  that  gave  the  accent  to 
the  life  of  Paul :  "  Lord,  what  wilt  thou 
have  me  to  do?"  When  in  works  of  Mercy 
and  Help  our  tens  of  thousands  of  Epworth 
Leaguers  are  loyally  living  this  prayer,  the 
problem  of  Edison,  as  applied  to  spiritual  dy- 
namics, will  be  solved,  and  the  latent  forces 
of  spiritual  energy  used  to  their  utmost. 
Then,  as  slavery  has  passed  away,  war  and 
tyranny  and  idleness  and  poverty  will  be 
no  more,  and  the  end  to  which  Christ  leads 
us,  and  for  which  He  died,  will  be  attained. 

WILLIAM  INGRAHAM  HAVEN, 

Vice-President  for  Mercy  and  Help  Department. 

INWOOD  LODGE,  PINE  ISLAND  N.H. 

August  1893 


AUTHOR'S   PREFACE 


THIS  volume  had  its  origin  in  experiences 
which  came  to  me  in  the  daily  duties  of  a  city 
pastorate.  The  inadequate  wages  received  by 
some  of  the  members  of  my  own  congregation, 
and  the  impoverished  and  unhealthy  surround- 
ings of  many  of  the  poor  people  who  came  for 
me  to  christen  their  children,  pray  with  their 
sick,  or  bury  their  dead,  so  aroused  my  sym- 
pathy for  the  victims,  arid  my  indignation 
against  the  cruel  or  indifferent  causes  of  their 
misery,  that  I  determined  upon  a  thorough  and 
systematic  investigation  of  the  conditions  of 
life  among  the  worthy  Boston  poor.  By  the 
word  "  worthy  "  I  do  not  mean  to  indicate  a 
class  of  saints,  but  the  poor  people  of  the  city 
who  are  willing  and  anxious  to  exchange  honest 
hard  work  for  their  support.  I  have  not,  in  the 
series  of  studies  here  presented,  entered  into  a 
7 


8  AUTHOR'S  PREFACE 

discussion  of  the  vicious  and  criminal  classes. 
I  have  tried  to  perform,  as  it  seemed  to  me,  a 
far  more  important  task  —  to  make  a  plea  for 
justice  on  behalf  of  the  crushed,  and  often  for- 
gotten, victims  of  greed,  who  work  and  starve 
in  their  cellars  and  garrets  rather  than  beg  or 
steal. 

The  larger  part  of  the  matter  contained  in 
these  pages  was  originally  delivered  in  a  series 
of  discourses  from  the  pulpit  of  St.  John's 
Methodist  Episcopal  Church,  South  Boston,  and 
retains  here  the  direct  form  of  the  spoken 
address. 

I  desire  to  make  a  personal  acknowledgment 
to  some  who  have  given  me  great  assistance  in 
making  the  investigations,  the  results  of  which 
are  here  recorded.  I  am  greatly  indebted  to 
Mr.  B.  O.  Flower,  Editor  of  The  Arena,  for 
many  kindnesses,  and  especially  for  the  use  of 
several  interesting  illustrations  originally  pre- 
pared for  the  magazine  over  which  he  so  ably 
and  gracefully  presides.  The  Rev.  Walter  J. 
Swaffield,  of  the  Boston  Baptist  Bethel,  the 
Rev.  C.  L.  D.  Younkin,  of  the  North  End  Mis- 
sion, the  Rev.  Geo.  L.  Small,  of  the  Mariners' 


AUTHOR S    PREFACE  9 

House,  the  Rev.  John  G.  May,  of  the  Italian 
Mission,  and  that  indefatigable  reformer,  Mrs. 
Alice  N.  Lincoln,  have  each  put  me  under  great 
obligations  by  their  unwearying  kindness  and 
willing  assistance.  I  am  also  greatly  indebted 
to  Mr.  Sears  Gallagher,  the  brilliant  young 
South  Boston  artist,  and  to  the  veteran  pho- 
tographer of  Boston  Highlands,  Mr.  W.  H. 
Partridge,  for  many  courtesies  in  connection 
with  the  illustrations  which  illumine  these 

chapters. 

Lours  ALBERT  BANKS. 

BOSTON,  September  15,  1891. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

I.     THE     WHITE     SLAVES     OF     THE     BOSTON 

"  SWEATEKS  " 17 

II.    LETTER  OF  CRITICISM 47 

III.  REPLY  TO  A  CRITICISM   ON   "  THE   WHITE 

SLAVES  OF  THE  BOSTON  SWEATERS"  .     .      55 

IV.  THE  PLAGUE  OF  THE  SWEAT-SHOP      .     .     .     ,gl 
Y.    THE  RELATION  OF  WAGES  TO  MORALS   .    .     109 

VI.     THE  WAGES  AND  TEMPTATIONS  OF  WORK- 
ING-PEOPLE      137 

VII.    BOSTON'S  UNCLE  TOM'S  CABIN 145 

VIII.    SOCIAL    MICROBES    IN    BOSTON    TENEMENT 

HOUSES,  AND  How  TO  DESTROY  THEM    .     179 

IX.     OLD  WORLD  TIDES  IN  BOSTON 213 

X.     OUR  BROTHERS  AND   SISTERS,  THE   BOSTON 

PAUPERS 257 

XL    COMMENT   ON    "  OUR    BROTHERS  AND  SIS- 
TERS, THE  BOSTON  PAUPERS"     ....     283 
XII.    THE  GOLD  GOD  OF  MODERN  SOCIETY      .     .    305 
11 


LIST   OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 


PAGE 

PORTRAIT  OF  AUTHOR Frontispiece 

PORTUGUESE  WIDOW  IN  ATTIC 21 

PORTUGUESE  WIDOW  AND  CHILDREN 29 

LITTLE  CHILDREN  FINISHING  PANTS 31 

INVALID  IN  CHAIR 33 

POSTAL  UNIFORMS 37 

A  TENEMENT-I-IOUSK  COURT 58 

SUNDAY  ON  NORTH  STREET 64 

CLARK'S  MISSION 70 

NORTH  END  JUNK  SHOP 74 

PIOME  OF  THE  MATHERS 77 

THE  PEANUTTER 85 

INSIDE  A  SWEAT-SHOP 92 

PAUL  REVERE  HOUSE,  NORTH  SQUARE 98 

REAR  OF  NORTH  END  TENEMENT  HOUSE   ....  102 

COMMONWEALTH  AVENUE .  104 

DRYING  "THE  FIND" Ill 

THE  NORTH  END  MISSION 116 

A  BOSTON  "  BRIDGE  OF  SIGHS  " 128 

COURT  OFF  NORTH  STREET 148 

CELLARWAY  LEADING  TO  UNDERGROUND  APART- 
MENTS    151 

SICK  MAN  IN  UNDERGROUND  APARTMENT      .     .     .  155 

AN  ANCIENT  TENEMENT 160 

ITALIAN  FRUIT-VENDERS  AT  HOME 163 

COCKROACHES  BY  FLASH-LIGHT 165 

BANANA  SELLER 166 

UNDERGROUND   TENEMENT  WITH  Two  BEDS  .     .     .169 

TWO   O'CLOCK   IN   THE   MORNING 175 

13 


14  LIST   OF    ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

EXTERIOR  OF  A  NORTH  END  TENEMENT  HOUSE  .  183 
WIDOW  AND  Two  CHILDREN  IN  UNDERGROUND 

TENEMENT 187 

THE  BANK  OF  THE  UNFORTUNATE 193 

OUT  OF  WORK 195 

A  CHEAP  LODGING-HOUSE .199 

THE  "GOOD  LUCK"  TENEMENT  HOUSE  ....  206 

THE  SAND  GARDEN 209 

CHRIST  CHURCH  TOWER 215 

ON  THE  CUNARDER 219 

ON  THE  WAY  TO  THE  RABBI  .  ........  221 

PASSING  THE  QUARANTINE  DOCTOR 224 

SURGICAL  THEOLOGY 229 

BUILDING  USED  BY  THE  BRITISH  AS  A  HOSPITAL  .  232 

VICTORIA  SQUARE 235 

OAK  DOOR  AT  ENTRANCE 238 

READING-ROOM  AT  FACTORY 241 

FERRIS  BROTHERS'  CORSET  FACTORY 247 

QUARTER  SECTION  OF  ONE  OF  THE  WORK  ROOMS  .  244 

THE  QUEEN  OF  THE  DUMP 252 

TRAMPS 261 

WOMEN'S  HOSPITAL  WARD  AT  LONG  ISLAND  .  .  284 

GETTING  A  BREATH  OF  FRESH  AIR 289 

ATTIC  AT  RAINSFORD  ISLAND 295 

MARINERS'  HOME 298 

CHILDREN  PLAYING  IN  COPP'S  HILL  BURYING- 

GROUND 309 

DIGGING  IN  THE  ASH-BARRELS  IN  WINTER  .  .  .  312 

FOUR  SHINERS 314 

SOUTH  BOSTON  RAG-PICKERS 317 


THE    WHITE   SLAVES   OF   THE 
BOSTON   "SWEATERS" 


*  Hard  work  is  good  an'  wholesome,  past  all  doubt; 
But  'tain't  so,  ef  the  mind  gits  tuckered  out." 

JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL  :  Biylow  Papers. 


o 
Uf- 


WHITE    SLAVES 


THE   WHITE   SLAVES   OF   THE   BOSTON 
"SWEATERS" 

A  WISE  man  of  the  old  time,  after  a  tour 
of  observation,  came  home  to  say,  "  So  I 
returned,  and  considered  all  the  oppressions 
that  are  done  under  the  sun  :  and  behold  the 
tears  of  such  as  were  oppressed,  and  they  had 
no  comforter ;  and  on  the  side  of  their  oppress- 
ors there  was  power ;  but  they  had  no  comforter." 
If  this  report  had  been  written  by  one  who 
had  been  climbing  with  me  through  the  tene- 
ment houses  of  not  less  than  a  score  of  Boston 
streets,  conversing  with  the  sewing-women, 
looking  on  their  poverty-lined  faces  and  their 
ragged  children,  breathing  the  poisonous  air  of 
the  quarters  where  they  work,  and  listening  to 
their  heart-rending  stories  of  cruelty  and  op- 
pression, it  would  be  an  appropriate  summary 
17 


18  WHITE   SLAVES 

of  our  observation.  It  is  my  purpose,  at  this 
time,  to  take  you  with  me  on  a  tour  of  observa- 
tion. As  well-lighted  streets  are  better  than 
policemen  to  insure  safety  and  good  order,  so 
I  believe  that  the  best  possible  service  I  can 
render  the  public  is  to  turn  on  the  light,  and 
tell,  as  plainly  and  simply  as  I  can,  the  story  of 
what  I  have  seen  and  heard  and  smelled  in  the 
white  slave-quarters,  which  are  a  disgrace  to  our 
fair  city. 

I  shall  confine  myself  at  this  time  entirely 
to  the  work  of  women  and  children  in  their 
own  homes.  Most  of  this  work  is  parcelled 
out  to  them  by  middlemen  who  are  known  as 
"  sweaters."  That  word  sweater  is  not  in  the 
old  dictionaries.  It  is  a  foul  word,  born  of  the 
greed  and  infernal  lust  for  gold  which  pervade 
the  most  reckless  and  wicked  financial  circles 
of  our  time.  The  sweater  takes  large  contracts 
and  divides  it  out  among  the  very  poor,  redu- 
cing the  price  to  starvation  limits,  and  reserving 
the  profits  for  himself. 

Some  of  the  women  whose  story  I  shall  tell 
do  not  work  for  sweaters,  but  are  treated  almost 
as  badly  by  the  powerful  and  wealthy  firms  who 


WHITE   SLAVES   OF  BOSTON    "  SWEATERS  "     19 

employ  them.  In  these  cases  the  firm  itself 
has  learned  the  sweater's  secret,  and  through  an 
agent  of  its  own  is  sweating  the  life-blood  out 
of  these  half-starved  victims. 

Let  us  begin  near  at  home  with  a  South 
Boston  case,  which  came  to  my  notice  through 
the  dispensary  doctor  for  the  district.  It  is  a 
widow  with  one  child  —  a  little  boy  scarcely 
three  years  old.  The  child  is  just  recovering 
from  a  troublesome  sickness,  through  which  the 
doctor  became  acquainted  with  her.  She  has 
been  sewing  for  a  good  while  for  one  of  the 
largest  and  most  respectable  dry-goods  houses 
on  Washington  Street  —  a  firm  whose  name  is 
a  household  word  throughout  New  England. 
Her  sewing  has  been  confined  to  two  lines  — 
cloaks  and  aprons.  For  some  time  she  has  been 
making  white  aprons  —  a  good  long  apron,  re- 
quiring a  yard,  perhaps,  of  material  ;  it  is 
hemmed  across  the  bottom  and  on  both  sides, 
the  band  or  "apron  string"  is  hemmed  on  both 
sides,  and  then  sewed  on  to  the  apron,  mak- 
ing six  long  seams.  For  these  she  is  paid 
fifteen  cents  a  dozen  !  And  besides  that,  this 
great,  rich  firm,  whose  members  are  rolling  in 


20  WHITE    SLAVES 

wealth  and  luxury,  charges  this  poor  widow 
fifteen  cents  expressage  on  her  package  of  ten 
dozen  aprons,  so  that  for  making  one  hundred 
and  twenty  aprons,  such  as  I  have  described, 
she  receives,  net,  one  hundred  and  thirty-five 
cents !  If  she  works  from  seven  o'clock  in  the 
morning  until  eleven  o'clock  at  night,  she  can 
make  four, dozen;  but,  with  the  care  of  her  child, 
she  is  unable  to  average  more  than  three  dozen, 
for  which,  after  the  expressage  is  taken  out,  she 
receives  forty  cents  a  day  for  the  support  of 
herself  and  child. 

Her  rent  for  the  one  little  room  is  one  dollar 
per  week.  It  is  idle  to  say  that  this  firm  is  com- 
pelled to  do  this  by  competition,  for  the  material 
and  making  of  these  aprons  cost  less  than  ten 
cents,  and  the  firm  retails  them  ordinarily  at 
twenty-five  cents  apiece.  On  cloaks  she  did 
better,  receiving  from  fifty  to  seventy-five  cents 
apiece,  she  furnishing  her  own  sewing-silk  and 
cotton.  On  these  she  could  make,  by  working 
from  seven  A.  M.  till  eleven  P.  M.,  nearly  a 
dollar  a  day,  but  she  could  never  get  more  than 
six  cloaks  a  week,  so  that  the  income  for  the 
week  was  about  the  same. 


WHITE   SLAVES    OP   BOSTON    "  SWEATERS "      23 

Now  come  with  me  a  little  farther  around  the 
harbor.  Let  us  climb  up  three  flights,  to  a  little 
attic  suite  of  two  rooms,  so  low  at  the  side  that, 
with  my  length  of  anatomy,  I  have  to  keep  well 
to  the  middle  of  the  room  in  order  to  stand 
upright.  Here  live  a  Portuguese  mother  and 
five  children,  the  oldest  thirteen,  the  youngest 
not  yet  three,  a  poor,  deformed,  little  thing  that 
has  consumption  of  the  bowels,  brought  on  by 
scanty  and  irregular  food.  Its  tiny  legs  are 
scarcely  thicker  than  my  thumb,  and  you  can- 
not look  at  its  patient,  wasted,  little  face,  that 
looks  old  enough  to  have  endured  twenty-five 
years  of  misery,  instead  of  three,  without  the 
heartache.  I  ask  the  mother  how  she  earns  her 
living,  and  she  points  to  a  package  that  has  just 
come  in.  Picking  it  up,  and  untying  the  strings, 
I  find  there  six  pairs  of  pants,  cut  out  and 
basted  up,  ready  for  making.  Looking  at  the 
card,  we  are  astonished  to  find  that  it  bears  the 
name  of  one  of  the  largest  firms  in  the  city  of 
Boston,  a  firm  known,  perhaps,  as  widely  as  any. 
Three  pairs  of  these  pants  are  custom-made ; 
they  are  fashionable  summer  .trousers,  with  the 
names  and  addresses  of  the  men  for  whom  they 


24  WHITE   SLAVES 

are  made  tacked  on  them.  The  other  three 
pairs  are  stamped  with  "New  York"  as  cus- 
tomer, from  which  we  infer  that  they  are  made 
for  a  New  York  house,  the  Boston  firm  acting 
as  sweater.  This  woman  and  her  little  children 
must  finish  these  pants  by  the  same  hour  to- 
morrow, when  the  messenger  from  the  store  will 
bring  a  new  lot  and  take  these  away.  She 
receives  ten  cents  a  pair  —  three  pairs  being 
custom-made  pants !  In  order  to  finish  the  six 
pairs  in  the  twenty-four  hours,  she  must  get  to 
work  at  six  in  the  morning,  and  improve  every 
available  moment  until  eleven  or  twelve  in  the 
evening,  and  sometimes,  if  the  sick  child  is  fret- 
ful, until  one  o'clock  in  the  morning.  Her  wages 
for  this  tremendous  strain  that  is  wearing  her 
very  life  away,  until  she  looks  almost  as  frail 
as  her  dying  child,  is  sixty  cents  !  Her  rent  for 
these  two  small  attic  pockets  is  one  dollar  and 
fifty  cents  per  week.  She  has  one  bed  for  her- 
self and  five  children.  Only  through  the  aid 
of  the  Boston  Baptist  Bethel  is  she  able  to  keep 
up  the  struggle.  And  yet,  O  my  brothers ! 
this  is  in  sight  of  the  old  North  Church,  and 
the  tower  where  they  hung  the  lanterns  for  a 


WHITE    SLAVES    OF   BOSTON    "SWEATEES"      25 

signal  to  Paul  Revere,  when  he  rode  through 
the  darkness  to  arouse  the  Fathers  to  fight 
against  oppression.  God  help  us  to  hang  anoth- 
er light  for  liberty  in  the  midst  of  this  cruel 
slavery! 

Perhaps  you  are  tired  now,  and  want  to  rest, 
but  I  am  insatiable,  and  will  go  on.  Let  me 
give  you  the  record  of  six  families  found  in  the 
same  tenement. 

Family  No.  1.  They  are  Italians.  The  wife 
and  mother  is  Finishing  cheap  overcoats  at  four 
cents  apiece.  She  can  finish  from  eight  to  ten 
in  a  day.  She  has  two  finer  coats,  lined  with 
handsome  satin  ;  of  these  she  can  complete  only 
five  a  day,  and  receives  eight  cents  apiece. 
There  are  three  in  the  family,  and  they  pay  a 
dollar  and  a  half  per  week  for  their  one  room. 
I  asked  about  the  husband,  and  a  neighbor 
woman  from  the  next  room  remarked  contemptu- 
ously, "  He  is  no  good." 

No.  2.  These  are  Poles.  The  woman  makes 
knee  pants  of  grammar-schoolboy  size ;  she 
receives  sixteen  cents  a  dozen  pairs.  Two 
dozen  are  as  many  as  she  ever  gets  done  in  a 
day. 


26  WHITE   SLAVES 

No.  3.  They  are  Italians  here,  and  are  at 
work  on  knee  pants.  This  woman  receives 
sixteen  cents  a  dozen  pairs  ,for  most  of  them, 
but  for  some  extra  nice  ones  she  gets  eighteen 
cents  a  dozen.  She  has  two  dozen  brought  to 
her  from  the  sweater's  shop  every  day  about  two 
o'clock.  She  works  from  two  in  the  afternoon 
until  ten  at  night,  and  from  six  in  the  morning 
until  noon  the  next  day,  to  complete  her  allow- 
ance, for  which  she  receives  from  thirty-two  to 
thirty-six  cents.  The  rent  is  a  dollar  and 
seventy -five  cents  per  week;  she  has  two 
children. 

No.  4.  This  woman  makes  men's  pants  at 
twelve  cents  a  pair.  Formerly,  when  she  was 
stronger,  she  could  drive  herself  through  six 
pairs  a  day ;  but  now,  with  a  little  babe  to  look 
after,  she  can  get  only  four  pairs  done.  The 
room  is  intolerably  dirty ;  but  how  can  you  have 
the  heart  to  blame  her? 

No.  5.  Polish  Jews.  The  woman  makes 
knee  pants,  working  from  seven  in  the  morning 
till  ten  o'clock  at  night,  and  nets  from  twenty- 
seven  to  forty-four  cents  a  day. 

No.   6.  Italians.     This  woman   is   an   expert 


WHITE    SLAVES    OF    BOSTON  "  SWEATERS  "      27 

seamstress.  She  is  finishing  men's  coats  at 
six  cents  apiece  ;  and  with  nothing  to  bother 
her,  working  sixteen  hours  a  day,  she  makes 
fifty-four  cents.  The  rent  for  the  narrow  little 
back  room  is  one  dollar  and  thirty-five  cents 
per  week. 

If  you  want  variety,  we  will  climb  four 
flights  of  stairs,  with  half  the  plastering  knocked 
off  the  walls,  and  talk  with  an  English  woman. 
She  is  working  on  fine  cloth  pants ;  she  gets 
thirteen  cents  a  pair ;  by  working  till  very  late 
in  the  evening,  she  can  complete  four  pairs  a 
day,  and  thinks  it  would  be  almost  a  paradise 
if  she  could  make  her  fifty-two  cents  every  day ; 
but  it  is  one  of  the  characteristics  of  a  sweater 
to  systematically  keep  all  his  people  hungry  for 
work,  and  she  seldom  is  able  to  get  more  than 
twelve  pairs  a  week.  She  lives  alone  in  a  little 
sweat-box  under  the  roof,  for  which  she  pays  a 
dollar  and  a  quarter  per  week. 

Not  far  away,  up  two  flights,  we  find  a  Portu- 
guese widow,  with  four  little  girls,  the  eldest 
fifteen,  the  next  thirteen,  and  the  younger  ones 
three  and  six,  respectively ;  they  are  all  dwarfed 
by  hardship  and  insufficient  food,  so  that  the 


28  WHITE   SLAVES 

one  who  is  fifteen  is  not  larger  than  an  average 
girl  of  twelve.  The  mother  is  sick,  and  the 
girls  are  trying  to  keep  the  wolf  from  the  door 
by  carrying  on  the  sewing.  They  are  all  hard 
at  work ;  they  carry  the  pants  back  arid  forth 
themselves,  and  so  for  the  most  of  their  work 
receive  twelve  cents,  though  for  some  they  get 
only  ten  cents  a  pair.  They  have  only  two 
little  rooms  with  the  most  meagre  furniture  ;  the 
rent  is  one  dollar  and  a  half  per  week,  and  the 
sick  mother  and  four  girls  huddle  together  in 
the  one  bed  at  night.  They  are  pretty,  bright- 
faced,  intelligent  girls,  and  with  a  fair  chance 
would  grow  into  strong,  noble  women ;  but  one 
shudders  when  he  takes  into  consideration  the 
fearful  odds  against  which  they  will  have  to 
struggle  in  this  poverty-stricken,  crime-cursed 
alley. 

Here  is  another  case  of  a  similar  description 
only  a  few  blocks  away.  We  go  up  three 
narrow  flights,  steep  and  dark,  for  space  is  as 
important  in  a  low-class  Boston  tenement  house 
as  in  a  sardine  box.  The  stairway  is  slippery 
from  filth  on  the  last  flight,  for  on  a  small 
bench  at  the  top,  in  a  dry-goods  box,  a  little 


WHITE   SLAVES   OF    BOSTON  "SWEATEES' 


31 


boy  is  raising  squabs  for  the  market,  and  the 
pigeon   business,    however   much    it   may  help 


LITTLE   CHILDREN   FINISHING  PANTS. 

to  pay  the  rent,  is  not  conducive  to  cleanliness. 
We  find  here  a  suite  of  three  little  rooms,  the 


32  WHITE   SLAVES 

largest  of  which  is  not  more  than  10x10;  the 
others  are  much  smaller.  In  these  three  little 
pigeon  boxes  eight  people  live,  at  least  sleep  — 
five  men  and  boys,  and  a  mother  and  two  girls. 
The  men  are  off  most  of  the  day,  and  work  at 
such  jobs  as  they  find;  the  mother  and  little 
girls  make  pants  for  another  leading  Boston 
clothing  house.  The  two  little  girls,  the 
younger  only  three  years,  are  both  overcasting 
seams.  The  three  make  on  an  average  sixteen 
pairs  of  pants  a  week,  for  which  they  get  thir- 
teen cents  a  pair;  the  young  pigeon  fancier, 
already  spoken  of,  carrying  the  goods  to  and 
fro.  The  rent  of  these  crowded  quarters  is  two 
dollars  and  a  quarter  per  week.  In  the  same 
building,  clown-stairs,  we  went  into  a  room  which 
could  not  have  been  more  than  10  X  12,  where 
an  American  woman,  with  seven  young  women 
helping  her,  was  at  work  dressmaking.  We 
could  not  discover  whether  they  were  working 
for  the  stores  or  not,  but  the  air  was  poisonous, 
and  the  workers  had  that  deadly  pallor  which 
comes  from  habitually  breathing  bad  air  and 
from  lack  of  sufficient  food.  ^ 

Sickness,  to  be    dreaded   anywhere,  is   espe- 


WHITE   SLAVES   OF   BOSTON    "SWEATERS"     35 

cially  pitiful  among  these  sweaters'  slaves  in  the 
city.  In  the  country  the  fresh  air,  fragrant 
with  the  breath  of  new-mown  hay,  or  sweetened 
from  ten  thousand  clover  blossoms,  is  free  to 
the  poorest,  but  to  be  sick  in  a  tenement  house 
is  something  terrible.  Yet  crowded  quarters, 
poisonous  air,  and  filthy  clothing  make  sickness 
a  common  guest  in  such  places.  I  climbed  one 
day  up  two  flights  into  a  dirty  little  room,  the 
smell  of  which  was  sickening  to  me  in  three 
minutes,  and  yet  there  I  found  a  man  on  a 
little  cot  (that  had  been  given  by  the  charitable 
missionary  who  guided  me)  who  has  been  lying 
there  for  more  than  three  years.  For  two  years 
and  more  he  had  not  even  a  cot,  but  lay  on  the 
floor  in  his  dirt  and  pain.  There  are  two  chil- 
dren, too  young  to  be  of  much  assistance ;  the 
wife  and  mother  sews,  finishing  pants  for  a 
rich  Washington  Street  firm.  She  gets  twelve, 
and  sometimes,  on  fine,  custom-made  pants,  thir- 
teen cents  a  pair.  She  has  worked  so  hard 
and  continuously  on  poor  food  and  with  in- 
sufficient clothing,  that  rheumatism  has  settled 
in  the  joints  of  her  fingers  and  stiffened  them, 
till  she  is  only  able  to  turn  off  nine  or  ten 


36  WHITE    SLAVES 

pairs  a  week.  Last  week  she  could  only  make 
a  dollar  and  fifteen  cents ;  the  rent  \vas  a 
dollar  and  a  quarter.  They  have  absolutely 
none  of  the  ordinary  comforts  of  life ;  the  sick 
man  has  no  sheets  for  his  cot,  <and  the  rheu- 
matic mother  sleeps  with  her  children  on  the 
floor. 

Down-stairs,  we  look  in  on  a  mother  and  two 
grown  daughters  who  are  finishing  pants  for 
another  fashionable  firm,  one  which  does  a  large 
business  with  clergymen.  They  are  paid  thir- 
teen cents  a  pair,  ordinarily,  and  for  the  very 
finest  custom-made  pants  they  receive  as  high 
as  twenty  cents,  but  complain,  as  it  takes  so 
much  longer  with  the  fine  pants,  that  from  two 
to  three  pairs  is  as  much  as  one  woman  can 
complete  in  a  day.  There  is  a  helpless  air 
about  this  mother  and  her  daughters  that  is 
very  depressing. 

There  has  been  quite  a  controversy  recently 
as  to  where  the  new  United  States  postal  uni- 
forms for  the  Boston  carriers  were  made.  I 
settled  this  question  to  my  own  satisfaction 
during  the  past  week,  when,  in  company  with 
Dr.  Luther  T.  Townsend,  of  Boston  Univer- 


WHITE   SLAVES   OF    BOSTON  "SWEATERS"      37 

sity,  and  two  other  gentlemen,  one  of  them 
being  an  Italian  interpreter,  I  climbed  the 
rickety  stairs  of  an  old  North  End  tenement 
house,  and  found  the  pants  for  these  same  uni- 


POSTAL    UNIFORMS. 


forms  being  made  by  Italian  women  at  nine  and 
a  half  cents  a  pair!  They  received  them  from 
a  Jewish  sweater.  One  of  these  women  says 
that,  by  beginning  at  four  o'clock  in  the  morn- 
ing and  frequently  working  until  twelve  o'clock 
at  night,  she  can  make  six  pairs  of  these  pants 


38  WHITE   SLAVES 

in  a  day.  She  has  five  children ;  the  rent  is  two 
dollars  per  week.  The  husband  has  been  ont 
of  work  for  eight  months ;  the  only  one  of  the 
children  who  is  able  to  earn  anything  is  a  boy 
who  is  a  bootblack,  and  can  earn,  in  fine  weather, 
three  dollars  a  week.  Another  woman  at  work 
on  these  postal  uniforms,  who  was  not  able 
to  labor  quite  such  long  hours,  could  only 
make  four  pairs  a  day.  She  also  had  five 
children,  the  only  one  able  to  earn  anything 
being  a  daughter,  fourteen  years  of  age,  who 
works  in  a  sweater's  shop  for  two  dollars  a 
week. 

On  the  walls  of  the  rooms  in  this  building 
where  the  postal  uniforms  were  being  made,  the 
cockroaches  were  crawling,  and  in  some  places 
were  swarming  as  thick  as  ants  about  an  ant- 
hill. 

I  have  my  note-books  full  of  many  other  cases, 
including  Portuguese,  Italian,  English,  Polish, 
and  a  few  Irish  and  American  women,  of  the 
same  general  character  as  those  already  related ; 
but  a  similar  wicked  scale  of  prices  runs  through 
the  making  of  other  clothing.  I  called  on  a 
woman  in  South  Boston  last  week  who  was 


WHITE   SLAVES    OF    BOSTON  "  SWEATERS  "      39 

making  overalls  for  a  city  firm  at  sixty  cents  a 
dozen  pairs.  They  are  the  large  variety  of  over- 
alls, such  as  expressmen  and  such  workers  use, 
with  straps  going  over  the  shoulders.  I  took  a 
tape-line  and  carefully  measured  the  sewing  on 
one  pair  of  these  overalls.  When  they  come  to 
the  seamstress,  there  has  not  been  a  stitch  taken 
in  them  —  they  are  simply  cut  out.  There  are 
thirty  separate  and  distinct  seams  to  be  sewed, 
making  in  the  aggregate  thirty-two  and  a  half 
feet  of  sewing,  for  which  she  receives  the  gross 
amount  of  five  cents,  out  of  which  she  has  to 
pay  the  carrying  to  and  fro.  If  she  goes  after 
them  herself,  she  can  bring  only  two  dozen  at  a 
time,  which  will  cost  her  ten  cents  car-fare,  go- 
ing and  coming.  When  sent  by  express  in  a 
package  of  five  or  six  dozen  —  the  number  she  is 
able  to  make  in  a  week  —  she  is  charged  fifteen 
cents  expressage  each  way,  so  that  the  express- 
age  eats  up  the  making  of  six  pairs.  In  addi- 
tion to  this,  the  stiff  cloth  is  very  hard  on  machine 
needles,  and  she  will  break  about  ten  cents  worth 
per  week.  This  woman's  story  is  a  sad  one. 
Her  husband,  who  was  a  strong,  hard-working 
man,  fell  ill  through  an  over-strain,  and  died 


40  WHITE   SLAVES 

after  fifteen  months'  sickness,  two  months  ago. 
She  has  three  little  children,  the  oldest  four  years 
and  the  youngest  a  little  over  a  year.  Work 
as  hard  as  she  can,  driving  her  machine  until 
late  into  the  night,  she  is  able  to  make  only  five 
dozen  pairs  of  overalls  a  week,  which,  when 
expressage  and  breakage  of  needles  are  taken 
out,  leaves  her  two  dollars  and  sixty-five  cents. 
The  rent  is  a  dollar  and  a  half,  which  leaves 
one  dollar  and  fifteen  cents  for  the  food  and 
clothing  of  a  mother  and  three  children.  Of 
course  she  cannot  live  on  that,  and  would 
starve  to  death  if  she  were  not  assisted  by 
charity.  And  yet  there  is  a  firm  doing  busi- 
ness in  South  Boston  mean  enough  to  take 
advantage  of  the  fact  that  people  living  in 
this  part  of  the  city  are  compelled  to  pay  car- 
fare or  expressage  on  work  secured  in  the  city 
proper,  and  so  has  reduced  the  price  for  work 
given  out  in  South  Boston  to  fifty  cents  a  dozen 
pairs. 

I  talked  with  another  young  woman,  who  Jias 
made  overalls  for  both  these  firms,  and  has  been 
compelled  to  give  it  up  through  sickness  brought 
on  from  the  confinement  and  strained  position 


WHITE   SLAVES    OF   BOSTON  "  SWEATERS  "     41 

of  sitting  so  many  hours  a  day  over  a  sewing- 
machine.  This  poor  girl  told  me  that  both  of 
these  firms  were  now  giving  a  great  part  of  this 
class  of  work  to  the  public  authorities  in  charge 
of  the  House  of  Correction,  to  be  done  by  the 
prisoners,  and  that  a  daily  stint  for  a  woman  in 
prison  is  only  eight  pairs.  This  sick,  discouraged 
girl,  in  a  most  heart-breaking  way,  said  she 
thought  she  would  better  commit  some  crime  in 
order  to  procure  a  place  in  the  House  of  Cor- 
rection, for  there  she  would  have  much  better 
quarters,  a  great  deal  nicer  food,  and  would  only 
have  to  make  eight  pairs  a  day,  while  at  home 
she  must  force  herself  to  make  at  least  a  dozen 
pairs  a  day,  or  starve. 

Fellow-citizens,  what  do  you  think  of  this  ?  Is 
there  not  something  wrong  in  a  system  of  things 
that  permits  the  authorities  of  the  State  or  city 
to  enter  into  competition  with  the  sewing-women 
of  Boston  at  such  a  cruel  and  heartless  *  rate 
that  no  woman  can  work  at  it  and  keep  out  of 
prison,  unless  she  is  assisted  by  charity?  This 
same  South  Boston  firm  gives  out  men's  shirts 
to  be  made  at  sixty  cents  a  dozen.  The  mate- 
rial for  one  of  these  shirts  costs  twenty-three 


42  WHITE   SLAVES 

cents,  the  making  five  cents  —  a  total  of  twenty- 
eight  cents.  They  retail  these  shirts  at  fifty 
cents  apiece,  making  a  net  profit  of  twenty-two 
cents  on  an  investment  of  twenty-eight  cents 
for  a  few  weeks'  time. 

During  the  last  few  weeks,  as  I  have  gone 
about  among  these  women,  my  ears  have  been 
haunted  with  that  old  song  of  Thomas  Hood, 
as  appropriate  now,  in  the  latter  part  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  in  the  city  of  Boston,  as  it 
ever  has  been  anywhere,  at  any  time,  in  the  his- 
tory of  human  greed. 

With  fingers  weary  and  worn, 

With  eyelids  heavy  and  red, 

A  woman  sat,  in  unwomanly  rags, 

Plying  her  needle  and  thread  — 

Stitch  !  stitch  !  stitch  ! 

In  poverty,  hunger,  and  dirt; 

And  still  with  a  voice  of  dolorous  pitch 

She  sang  the  "  Song  of  the  Shirt  !" 

'  *  Work !  work !  work ! 
While  the  cock  is  crowing  aloof  ! 
And  work  —  work  —  work, 
Till  the  stars  shine  through  the  roof ! 
It's,  oh!  to  be  a  slave 
Along  with  the  barbarous  Turk, 
Where  woman  has  never  a  soul  to  save, 
If  this  is  Christian  work  ! 


WHITE   SLAVES    OF   BOSTON  "  SWEATEES  "     43 

"  Work  —  work  —  work ! 
Till  the  brain  begins  to  swim ! 
Work  —  work  —  work 
Till  the  eyes  are  heavy  and  dim ! 

Stitch  —  stitch  —  stitch, 
In  poverty,  hunger,  and  dirt,  — 
Sewing  at  once,  with  a  double  thread, 
A  shroud  as  well  as  a  shirt ! 

"  But  why  do  I  talk  of  death, 
That  phantom  of  grisly  bone  ? 
I  hardly  fear  his  terrible  shape, 
It  seems  so  like  my  own  — 
It  seems  so  like  my  own 
Because  of  the  fast  I  keep: 
O  God !  that  bread  should  be  so  dear, 
And  flesh  and  blood  so  cheap ! 

"  Work  —  work  —  work ! 
My  labor  never  flags; 

And  what  are  its  wages  ?    A  bed  of  straw, 
A  crust  of  bread  —  and  rags, 
That  shattered  roof  —  and  this  naked  floor  — 
A  table  —  a  broken  chair  — 
And  a  wall  so  blank  my  shadow  I  thank 
For  sometimes  falling  there! 

"  Work  —  work  —  work 
From  weary  chime  to  chime  ! 
Work  —  work  —  work 
As  prisoners  work  for  crime!  " 

If  Thomas  Hood  had  lived  in  our  day,  and 
could  have  gone  around  with  me  in  Boston,  he 


44  WHITE   SLAVES 

would  have  had  to  make  it  stronger  yet.  for 
among  us  the  good,  honest  sewing-woman  must 
work  at  least  one-third  harder  than  the  "  pris- 
oners work  for  crime."  And  on  such  wages 
the  prayer  with  which  he  continues  must  be 
forever  unanswered :  — 

"Oh  !  but  to  breathe  the  breath 
Of  the  cowslip  and  primrose  sweet  — 
With  the  sky  above  my  head, 
And  the  grass  beneath  my  feet! 
For  only  one  short  hour 
To  feel  as  I  used  to  feel, 
Before  I  knew  the  woes  of  want, 
And  the  walk  that  costs  a  meal ! 

"  Oh!  but  for  one  short  hour,  — 
A  respite,  however  brief ! 
No  blessed  leisure  for  love  or  hope, 
But  only  time  for  grief! 
A  little  weeping  would  ease  my  heart; 
But  in  their  briny  bed 
My  tears  must  stop,  for  every  drop 
Hinders  needle  and  thread!  " 

With  fingers  weary  and  worn, 

With  eyelids  heavy  and  red, 

A  woman  sat,  in  unwomanly  rags, 

Plying  her  needle  and  thread  — 

Stitch!  stitch!  stitch! 

In  poverty,  hunger,  and  dirt; 

And  still  with  a  voice  of  dolorous  pitch, — 

Would  that  its  voice  could  reach  the  rich!  — 

She  sang  this  "  Song  of  the  Shirt." 


II 

LETTER  OF  CRITICISM 


Slavery  ain't  o'  nary  color, 

'Tain't  the  hide  that  makes  it  wus, 

All  it  keers  fer  in  a  feller 
'S  jest  to  make  him  fill  its  pus." 

JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL  :  Biylow  Papers. 


II 

LETTER   OF  CRITICISM 

BOSTON,  June  29,  1891. 

REV.  Louis   ALBERT  BANKS,  St.  John's  M.  E.  Church, 
South  Boston,  Mass. 

Dear  Sir  :  —  In  the  sermon  which  you 
preached  yesterday,  the  title,  as  given  in  the 
newspapers,  is  "The  White  Slaves  of  Boston 
Sweaters."  Under  the  fourteenth  amendment 
to  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  there 
can  be  iio  such  thing  as  "  slave  "  in  this  country. 
Under  the  decision  of  Judge  Parsons  there  has 
not  been  a  slave  in  Massachusetts  since  the 
adoption  of  the  Constitution.  I  therefore  vent- 
ure to  ask  you  some  questions. 

1.  How   do    you    justify    the    term    "  white 
slave  "  when  applied  to  the  persons  whose  con- 
dition you  describe  ? 

2.  "Climb  three  flights  to  an  attic  suite  of 
two  rooms,  and  there  one  would  find  a  mother 
and  five  children  "  doubtless  in  very  bad  condi- 

47 


48  WHITE   SLAVES 

tion ;  the  mother  trying  to  support  them  ;  the 
tenement  doubtless  very  bad.  Suppose  we  con- 
demn the  tenement,  —  pull  it  down,  —  then 
these  people  would  have  no  roof  over  their 
heads.  Is  no  roof  better  than  some  kind  of  a 
roof?  Suppose  we  refuse  to  trust  her  to  make 
pants  ?  Is  no  work  better  than  some  work  ? 

3.  The  mother  earns  her  living,  or  part  of  it, 
by  making  "  pants."     Pants  made  in  this  way 
are  sold  at  a  very  low  price  at  retail,  after  being 
subjected   to    the    cost   of    distribution    in    the 
customary  way.     There  is  great  competition  in 
this   business.     That   competition   leads    every 
employer  to  pay  the  highest  wages  that  can  be 
recovered  from  the  sale  of  the  pants,  also  allow- 
ing the  sweater's  charge.    If  the  cost  of  making 
is  advanced  on  this  class  of  pants,  they  cannot 
be  sold  at  all ;  then  there  would  be  no  sweater, 
and  the  woman  would  get  no  work.    Is  no  work 
better  than  some  work  ? 

4.  The  sweater  deals  as  a  middleman  with 
the  manufacturer  and  the  worker.     If  he  did 
not  deal  with  this  kind  of  work,  it  would  cost 
the   manufacturer   more    to  reach   the    worker 
than   it  does   now;    no  sweater  would  be  em- 


LETTER    OF    CRITICISM  49 

ployed  if  he  did  not  earn  what  he  makes ;  then 
the  manufacturer,  or  clothier,  could  pay  less  for 
making  the  pants,  because  he  now  pays  all  that 
the  trade  will  bear.  If  it  cost  him  more  to 
reach  the  worker,  he  must  pay  less.  Suppose 
we  abolish  the  sweater,  or  middleman,  then  he 
would  not  distribute  the  work,  and  there  would 
be  no  work.  Is  that  better  than  some  work  ? 

5.  Suppose  this  woman  had  not  come  here 
with  her  children  and  had  stayed,  perhaps,  in 
Italy  or  in  Russia,  instead  of  coming  here.     Is 
some  work  here  better  than  no  work  in  Italy  ? 

6.  If  the  mother  cannot  support  the  children, 
-being  now  in  this  country  without   having 

been  sent  back,  —  she  is  entitled  to  go  with  her 
children  to  the  almshouse,  where  suitable  shel- 
ter, clean  rooms,  and  good  food  would  be  pro- 
vided. Is  it  better  for  her  to  try  to  support  Tier 
children  under  existing  conditions  than  to  go  to 
the  almshouse  ? 

7.  There  is  an  ample  supply  of  money  avail- 
able for  purposes  of  true  charity.     Does  not  true 
charity  consist  in  refusing  to  give  alms  to  those 
who  can  or  may  support   themselves?      Is    it 
better  to  give  alms  to  those  people  in  their  attic, 


50  WHITE    SLAVES 

or  to  give  alms  to  them  under  the  conditions  of 
the  almshouse  ?  Which  course  would  be  most 
sure  to  pauperize  them  utterly? 

8.  The  use  of  the   term  "  slave  "  implies  a 
slave-owner  and  a  slave-driver.     In  this  series 
of    (1)    the    manufacturer,  (2)    the    sweater  or 
middleman,    and    (3)    the    working-woman   with 
Tier    children,    which    is    the    slave-owner   and 
which   is    the    slave-driver  ?      Under  what  au- 
thority does  the  slave-master  force  this  woman 
to  render  her  labor  for  all  that  it  is  worth? 

9.  If  her  work  is  worth  more  than  she  gets, 
can  she  not  get  it  ? 

A  little  inquiry  into  the  condition  of  the 
clothing  trade,  and  some  examination  of  the 
fact,  might  disclose  to  you  that  the  poor  sewing- 
woman  is  poor  because  she  sews  poorly,  and  that 
there  is  always  a  scarcity  of  skilful  and  intelli- 
gent sewing-women,  at  full  wages. 

My  final  question  is,  how  do  you  propose  to 
help  those  who  are  incapable  of  helping  them- 
selves, without  pauperizing  them  yet  more  than 
they  are  pauperized  under  their  present  con- 
ditions? What  will  you  do  when  you  have 
destroyed  the  house  and  done  away  with  the 
sweater  ?  . 


LETTER    OF    CRITICISM  51 

Are  you  justified,  as  a  Christian  minister,  in 
creating  a  prejudice  and  arousing  malignant 
passion  by  the  use  of  the  term  "  slave  ?  "  Can 
you  defend  or  justify  this  term,  under  the  con- 
ditions that  are  reported,  as  they  are  stated  in 
the  printed  report  of  your  sermon  ? 

I  venture  to  put  these  questions  to  you  be- 
cause I  think  that  the  dangerous  class  in  this 
community  is  to  be  found  among  persons  who, 
without  intelligence,  create  animosity,  and  by 
their  method  of  preaching  tend  to  retard  rather 
than  to  promote  the  progress  of  the  poor  and 
ignorant  in  this  country. 

Very  sincerely  yours, 


Ill 


REPLY    TO    A    CRITICISM     ON    "THE 

WHITE   SLAVES   OF   BOSTON 

SWEATERS " 


61  Freedom's  secret  wilt  tbou  know  ?  — 
Counsel  not  with  flesh  and  blood ; 
Loiter  not  for  cloak  or  food ; 
Right  thou  feelest,  rush  to  do." 

RALPH  WALDO  EMERSON:  Freedom. 


Ill 

REPLY  TO  A  CRITICISM  ON  "  THE  WHITE 
SLAVES  OF  THE  BOSTON  SWEATEES  " 

AMONG  the  scores  of  thankful  letters  which 
I  have  received,  commenting  on  the  dis- 
course on  "  The  White  Slaves  of  the  Boston 
Sweaters,"  there  is  one  of  an  entirely  different 
character,  written  by  a  distinguished  writer  on 
social  questions,  a  gentleman  for  whom  I  have 
always  entertained  the  highest  respect.  I  should 
be  very  glad  to  give  the  name  of  the  author  of 
this  letter ;  but  as  it  is  marked  "  personal,"  I 
cannot,  in  honor,  do  so. 

This  letter  so  clearly  and  unswervingly  out- 
lines and  defends  the  extreme  conservative  side 
of  this  question,  that  I  feel  I  cannot  do  a  better 
service  to  the  cause  of  the  "  sweater's  victim  " 
than  to  answer  it  in  this  public  way.  My 
critic  begins  by  assailing  the  title  of  the  dis- 
course. He  says:  "In  the  sermon  which  you 
55 


56  WHITE   SLAVES 

preached  yesterday,  the  title  as  given  in  the 
newspapers  is  '  The  White  Slaves  of  the  Boston 
Sweaters.'  Under  the  fourteenth  amendment 
to  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States,  there 
can  be  no  such  thing  as  'slave'  in  this  country. 
Under  the  decision  of  Judge  Parsons  there 
has  not  been  a  slave  in  Massachusetts  since 
the  adoption  of  the  Constitution."  Wonderful 
Judge  Parsons  !  who  is  able,  by  the  magic  wand 
of  his  decision,  to  unshackle  all  the  slaves  who, 
under  the  cruel  whip  of  necessity, — more  un- 
merciful than  any  slave-driver's  lash,  —  have 
sweated  under  the  burdens  imposed  by  avari- 
cious task-masters  in  every  city  of  the  com- 
monwealth. 

Can  you  make  men  free  by  constitution  sim- 
ply ?  Are  there  no  slaves  except  those  who,  like 
the  African  thirty  years  ago,  are  bought  and 
sold  at  the  auction  block?  Ay,  indeed!  for 
every  black  man  liberated  by  President  Lin- 
coln's proclamation,  there  is,  to-day,  a  white 
man  robbed  and  degraded  and  brutalized  by 
some  gigantic  trust  or  other  equally  soulless, 
unfeeling,  corporate  power. 

For  every  mother  whose  heart  was  broken  by 


REPLY   TO   A   CRITICISM  57 

having  her  children  wrenched  from  her  arms  in 
the  African  slave-market,  there  is  a  white 
mother,  whose  very  soul  is  crushed  at  the  sight 
of  her  hungry,  ragged,  little  ones.  For  every 
black  babe  torn  from  its  mother's  breast  by  the 
iniquitous  system  of  negro  slavery,  the  slums 
of  our  great  cities  have  a  white  child,  whose 
future  is  equally  dark  and  hopeless. 

My  critic's  first  question  is,  "  How  do  you 
justify  the  term  '  white  slave '  when  applied  to 
the  persons  whose  condition  you  describe?" 
My  answer  is  very  simple.  If  a  widow  with 
little  children  to  care  for,  who  cannot  go  out 
to  do  other  kinds  of  work,  and  is  compelled  to 
work  eighteen  hours  a  day  for  fifty  cents,  and 
dares  not  give  this  up  for  fear  of  starvation  to 
her  children,  is  not  a  slave,  then  will  somebody 
tell  me  what  element  is  lacking  to  make 
slavery  ? 

The  second  question  is  as  follows :  " '  Climb 
three  flights  to  an  attic  suite  of  two  rooms,  and 
there  one  would  find  a  mother  and  five  chil- 
dren,' doubtless  in  very  bad  condition ;  the 
mother  trying  to  support  them ;  the  tenement 
doubtless  very  bad.  Suppose  we  condemn  the 


58  WHITE    SLAVES 

tenement,  —  pull  it  down,  —  then  these  people 
will  have  no  roof  over  their  heads.     Is  no  roof 


A  TENEMENT-HOUSE   COUKT. 

better  than  some  kind  of  a  roof?  Suppose  we 
refuse  to  trust  her  to  make  pants  —  is  no  work 
better  than  some  work  ?  " 


KEPLY   TO   A   CRITICISM  59 

To  the  first  part  of  this  question,  relating  to 
the  roof  of  this  bad  tenement  house,  I  answer 
frankly :  Yes,  no  roof  is  better.  This  poor 
woman,  working  at  starvation-wages,  is  fur- 
nishing from  twelve  to  twenty  per  cent  interest 
on  the  money  invested  in  this  miserable  old 
rookery,  whose  heartless  landlord,  like  the  un- 
just judge  of  the  Gospels,  fears  not  God  and 
regards  not  man.  If  we  condemn  this  disease- 
breeding  death-trap,  it  will  not  be  a  question  of 
this  woman  having  "  no  roof  "  over  her  head, 
but  she  may  have  a  decent  roof,  with  healthful, 
sanitary  regulations,  at  a  less  rent  than  she  now 
pays,  and  still  pay  an  honest  interest  on  the 
investment  to  the  landlord.  As  to  the  second 
part  of  the  question,  "  Is  no  work  better  than 
some  work  ?  "  that  is  not  a  fair  putting  of  the 
question.  Our  modern  Christian  civilization 
does  not  dare  to  put  it  that  way.  It  is  not  a 
question  of  no  work,  or  some  work.  We  must 
furnish  this  woman  some  work,  at  such  just  and 
rightful  wages  as  shall  give  her  and  her  chil- 
dren bread  to  eat  and  raiment  to  put  on,  and  a 
decent,  though  it  be  humble,  roof  over  their 
heads. 


60  WHITE    SLAVES 

We  pass  to  our  critic's  third  question  :  "  The 
mother  earns  her  living,  or  a  part  of  it,  by  mak- 
ing c  pants.'  Pants  made  in  this  way  are  sold  at 
a  very  low  price  at  retail,  after  being  subjected 
to  the  cost  of  distribution  in  the  customary  way. 
There  is  great  competition  in  4:his  business. 
That  competition  leads  every  employer  to  pay 
the  highest  wages  that  can  be  recovered  from 
the  sale  of  the  pants,  also  allowing  the  sweater's 
charge.  If  the  cost  of  making  is  advanced  on 
this  class  of  pants,  they  cannot  be  sold  at  all ; 
then  there  would  be  no  sweater,  and  the  woman 
would  get  no  work.  Is  no  work  better  than 
some  work?  "  The  trouble  with  a  great  deal  of 
this  is,  that  it  is  incorrect  both  in  its  premise 
and  in  its  reasoning.  It  is  indeed  true  that 
there  is  great  competition  in  the  clothing  busi- 
ness, but  it  is  not  true  that  the  result  of  this 
competition  leads  every  employer  to  pay  the 
highest  wages  that  can  be  recovered  from  the 
sale  of  the  pants.  It  is  also  a  remarkable  state- 
ment to  make,  that  if  the  cost  is  advanced,  then 
there  will  be  no  more  pants  made.  Can  my 
critic  really  believe  that  the  whole  of  mankind 
would  suddenly  go  "pantless"  if  the  price  for 


REPLY   TO    A   CIUTICISM  61 

making  them  were  raised  to  a  point  where  the 
sewing-woman  could  make  a  decent  living  ?  It 
is  also  a  curious  statement  to  make  that  "  If 
there  were  no  sweater,  the  woman  would  get  no 
work."  The  sweater  is  a  comparatively  recent 
institution,  and  I  devoutly  believe  an  institution 
of  the  devil.  Before  the  sweater  came  to  be  a 
factor  in  the  situation,  the  woman  had  work, 
and  better  pay  than  she  now  receives.  The 
incoming  of  the  sweater  has  not  resulted  in 
more  work,  but  in  less  wages. 

If  my  critic  will  take  the  trouble  to  examine 
the  testimony  given  before  the  committee  ap- 
pointed by  the  English  House  of  Lords,  which 
may  be  found  in  the  Public  Library,  he  will  see 
that  it  is  the  universal  testimony  of  hundreds 
of  witnesses  that  the  sweater  is  an  unnecessary 
factor  in  the  manufacturing  trades,  and  that  in 
every  department  of  the  labor  world  where  the 
sweating  system  has  been  introduced,  the  wages 
of  the  laborer  have  been  reduced  from  forty  to 
seventy  per  cent. 

The  fourth  question  is  similar  to  the  third : 
"  The  sweater  deals  as  a  middleman  with  the 
manufacturer  and  the  worker.  If  he  did  not 


62  WHITE   SLAVES 

deal  with  this  kind  of  work,  it  would  cost  the 
manufacturer  more  to  reach  the  worker  than  it 
does  now.  No  sweater  would  be  employed  if 
he  did  not  earn  what  he  makes.  Then  the 
manufacturer,  or  clothier,  could  pay  less  for 
making  the  pants,  because  he  now  pays  all  the 
trade  will  bear.  If  it  cost  him  more  to  reach 
the  worker,  he  must  pay  less.  Suppose  we 
abolish  the  sweater,  or  middleman,  then  he 
would  not  distribute  the  work,  and  there 
would  be  no  work.  Is  that  better  than  some 
work  ?  " 

I  have  already  answered  this  question  in 
part.  It  is  not  correct  that  it  would  cost  the 
manufacturer  more  to  reach  the  worker  without 
the  sweater  than  with  him.  It  is  also  ridicu- 
lous to  suppose  that  if  the  sweater  were  abol- 
ished there  would  be  no  work.  The  demand 
for  clothing  would  be  just  the  same  without  the 
sweater  as  with  him.  Besides  that,  everything 
that  takes  the  employer  away  from  the  people 
who  do  his  work,  and  removes  him  from  contact 
with  them,  is  a  bad  thing,  and  always  bodes  ill 
to  any  harmonious  relation  between  capital  and 
labor.  I  am  satisfied  that  there  are  proprie- 


REPLY  TO   A   CRITICISM  63 

tors  in  Boston  firms,  who,  if  they  could  go 
around  with  me,  and  see,  as  I  have  seen,  the 
poverty  and  suffering  of  the  sweaters'  slaves 
who  are  making  up  their  goods,  would  revolt 
against  the  whole  system.  It  is  only  the 
sweater  who  comes  in  contact  with  these  peo- 
ple, and  the  sweater  is,  as  a  rule,  greedy  and 
avaricious,  and  hardened  against  all  humane 
feeling. 

We  pass  to  the  fifth  question :  "  Suppose 
this  woman  had  not  come  here  with  her  chil- 
dren, and  had  stayed,  perhaps,  in  Italy  or  in 
Russia,  instead  of  coming  here.  Is  some  work 
here  better  than  no  work  in  Italy  ?  "  Very 
likely  it  is  true  that  the  woman  is  as  well  off 
here  as  she  would  be  in  Italy.  But  is  Italy  to 
be  the  standard  of  our  American  civilization? 
I  stood  on  a  bridge  over  the  Tiber,  fronting  the 
famous  castle  of  St.  Angelo  in  Rome,  on  a  hot 
Sunday  morning  in  July,  and  watched  a  com- 
pany of  people  on  a  barge  who  were  driving 
piles  in  the  river.  There  were  about  eighty 
men  and  women,  the  sexes  about  equally 
divided,  pulling  and  tugging  away,  in  the  hot 
sun,  at  ropes  and  pulleys,  in  order  to  lift  the 


64 


WHITE   SLAVES 


heavy  iron  hammer  and  drop  it  on  the  head  of 
the  piling.  In  Boston  there  would  have  been  a 
little  donkey  engine,  and  one  or  two  men  to 
look  after  it  all  the  crew  that  would  have 


SUNDAY    ON    NOliTU    STREET. 


been  needed.  Shall  we  go  back  to  Italy  for  a 
model?  Furthermore,  this  Italian  woman  is 
setting  up  a  standard  of  life  for  all  laboring 
women.  It  is  not  enough  to  say  she  is  as  well 
off  here  as  in  Italy.  We  cannot  afford  to  per- 
mit the  establishing  of  little  Italian  centres 


REPLY   TO   A   CRITICISM  65 

throughout  the  Republic,  with  which  every 
American  laborer  in  the  land  must  enter  into 
competition.  No  matter  where  people  came 
from,  nor  what  they  have  suffered  in  their 
native  land,  if  we  permit  them  to  come  to  us, 
we  are  compelled,  in  sheer  self-defence,  to  see 
that  they  are  treated  fairly  and  > justly,  and  re- 
ceive a  sufficient  compensation  for  their  toil  to 
support  them  in  cleanliness,  intelligence,  and 
morality. 

Question  six  raises  a  different  problem :  "  If 
the  mother  cannot  support  the  children,  —  being 
now  in  this  country,  without  having  been  sent 
back,  —  she  is  entitled  to  go  with  her  children 
to  the  almshouse,  where  suitable  shelter,  clean 
rooms,  and  good  food  will  be  provided.  Is  it 
better  for  her  to  try  to  support  her  children, 
under  existing  conditions,  than  to  go  to  the  alms- 
house  ?  "  It  is,  of  course,  better  for  the  woman 
to  try  to  support  her  children.  The  almshouse 
is  for  the  sick  and  helplessly  infirm.  Such 
may  go  there  in  all  honor,  without  disgrace. 
I  doubt  not  there  are  men  in  the  almshouse 
who  have  done  more  service  to  humanity  than 
many  others  who  die  amid  luxury  and  wealth. 


66  WHITE   SLAVES 

But  nothing  can  be  more  vicious  than  to  speak 
of  people  who  are  able  and  willing  to  work  as 
candidates  for  the  almshouse,  because  the  cruel 
oppression  in  their  wages  makes  it  impossible 
for  them  to  support  themselves.  It  is  not 
charity  these  people  need  or  want ;  it  is  justice. 
True,  Christ  said,  "  The  poor  ye  have  always 
with  you,"  and  it  is  probable  that  we  shall 
always  need  to  support  by  charity  the  crippled, 
the  insane,  and  the  unfortunate,  but  it  is  a  cer- 
tain indication  of  rottenness  in  any  civilization 
that  makes  charity  necessary  for  a  man  or 
woman  who  is  able  and  willing  to  work. 

The  seventh  question  continues  this  same 
thought  with  variations :  "  There  is  an  ample 
supply  of  money  available  for  purposes  of  true 
charity.  Does  not  true  charity  consist  in  re- 
fusing to  give  alms  to  those  who  can,  or  may, 
support  themselves  ?  Is  it  better  to  give  alms 
to  these  people,  in  their  attic,  or  to  give  alms  to 
them  under  the  conditions  of  the  almshouse  ? 
What  course  would  be  most  sure  to  pauperize 
them  utterly  ?  "  For  once,  my  critic  and  my- 
self are  in  agreement.  I  believe  it  is  better  for 
one  to  partly  support  himself  than  not  to  do 


REPLY    TO    A    CRITICISM  67 

anything  towards  it.  Nothing  is  more  demoral- 
izing to  any  one  than  to  become  accustomed  to 
receive  charity.  But,  after  all,  you  may  pauper- 
ize people  almost  as  rapidly  in  the  attic  as  in 
the  almshouse.  It  is  against  the  whole  system 
that  I  make  war.  I  do  not  admit,  for  a  moment, 
that  it  is  necessary  for  the  sewing-woman  to 
receive  such  wages  as  to  compel  her  starvation, 
unless  alms  be  given  to  her  in  her  attic. 

In  the  discourse  which  is  thus  criticised  I 
showed  plainly  that  the  aprons  for  which  the 
seamstress  received,  net,  one  cent  for  making, 
returned  a  profit  of  fifteen  cents,  on  an  invest- 
ment of  ten  cents  by  her  employer.  Now,  I  do 
not  admit  that  the  rigors  of  competition  are  so 
great  that  it  compels  this  manufacturer  to  make 
one  hundred  and  fifty  per  cent  profit  while 
this  woman  toils  sixteen  hours  a  day  to  make 
forty-five  cents. 

I  showed  that  the  women  who  make  shirts 
made  only  fifty  cents  a  day,  and  yet  the  proprie- 
tor made  on  every  shirt  twenty-two  cents  profit 
on  an  investment  of  twenty-eight  cents.  I  dc 
not  admit  that  competition  is  so  stern  that  it  is 
necessary  for  this  shirt  manufacturer  to  make 


68  WHITE    SLAVES 

seventy-eight  per  cent  profit  while  the  woman 
who  works  for  him  must  beg  assistance  of  the 
Provident  Association,  or  see  her  children  cry 
for  bread. 

Or,  take  the  case  of  the  poor  girl,  whose 
mother  finishes  pants  for  the  postal  uniforms  at 
nine  and  one-half  cents  a  pair,  slaving  eighteen 
hours  for  fifty -seven  cents ;  and  she,  the  daugh- 
ter, toils  all  day  long,  in  the  midst  of  the 
physical  and  moral  stench  of  a  Jewish  sweater's 
shop,  for  sixteen  and  two-thirds  cents.  But  she 
is  better  off  than  the  orphan  girl  that  works 
beside  her,  whose  condition  some  poet  has 
described :  - 

"  Left  there,  nobody's  daughter, 
Child  of  disgrace  and  shame, 
Nobody  ever  taught  her 
A  mother's  sweet  saving  name. 

Nobody  ever  caring 

Whether  she  stood  or  fell, 
And  men  (are  they  men  ?)  ensnaring 

With  the  arts  and  the  gold  of  hell ! 

Stitching  with  ceaseless  labor 

To  earn  her  pitiful  bread ; 
Begging  a  crust  of  a  neighbor, 

And  getting  a  curse  instead ! 


REPLY   TO   A   CRITICISM  69 

All  through  the  long,  hot  summer, 
All  through  the  cold,  dark  time, 

With  fingers  that  numb  and  number 
Grow,  white  as  the  frost's  white  rime. 

Nobody  ever  conceiving 

The  throb  of  that  warm,  young  life, 

Nobody  ever  believing 

The  strain  of  that  terrible  strife ! 

Nobody  kind  words  pouring 
In  that  orphan  heart's  sad  ear; 

But  all  of  us  all  ignoring 
What  lies  at  our  door  so  near! " 

There  is  nothing  wholesome  in  the  question 
whether  it  is  better  to  pauperize  people  a  little 
in  the  attic,  or  to  pauperize  them  altogether  in 
the  almshouse.  We  ought  not  to  pauperize  them 
at  all.  A  noble  Christian  woman,  who  has  a 
young  men's  Bible  class  in  the  North  End,  and 
who  by  her  womanly  tact  and  Christian  sym- 
pathy has  gained  the  confidence  of  some  of  the 
most  hopeless  cases  in  that  section,  told  me  that 
one  of  these  boys  said  to  her,  "  When  the  Back 
Bay  folks  know  that  we  are  made  of  flesh  and 
blood,  they  won't  pauperize  us  any  longer." 

The  eighth  question  returns  in  some  of  its 
aspects  to  the  first :  "  The  use  of  the  term 


70 


WHITE   SLAVES 


'  slave '  implies  a  slave-owner  and  a  slave- 
driver.  In  this  series  of  the  manufacturer, 
the  sweater  or  middleman,  and  the  working- 
woman  with  her  children,  which  is  the  slave- 
owner, and  which  is  the  slave-driver?  Under 


CLA11K7S   MISSION. 


what  authority  does  the  slave-master  force  this 
woman  to  render  her  labor  for  all  that  it  is 
worth?"  Answering  the  last  part  of  the  ques- 
tion first,  I  have  already  shown  that  the  woman 
does  not  get  all  that  her  work  is  worth.  The 
manufacturer,  who  makes  from  seventy-eight 


REPLY   TO   A   CRITICISM  71 

to  a  hundred  and  fifty  per  cent  profit,  gets  a  far 
larger  proportion  of  the  profits  than  rightly 
belongs  to  him. 

Under  the  sweating  system,  the  sweater  is, 
most  emphatically,  both  the  slave-master  and 
slave-driver  ;  and  no  Georgia  overseer  was  ever 
more  cruel  than  some  of  these  sweater  task- 
masters in  Boston  to-day. 

Even  at  the  wretched  wages  they  pay,  they 
will  not  give  any  of  their  workers  all  the  work 
they  can  do ;  they  dole  out  the  work  to  them, 
trying  to  make  them  think  it  is  very  scarce. 
If  they  ask  for  higher  pay,  they  are  met  at 
once  with  a  threat  of  discharge.  Do  you  ask 
why  they  do  not  hunt  for  something  better? 
What  can  a  poor,  half-broken-down  mother,  with 
three  little  babies,  do  hunting  work?  Who 
will  pay  the  rent,  furnish  them  food,  and  care 
for  the  children  while  she  makes  her  search? 
There  are  thousands  of  laboring  people,  both 
men  and  women,  in  all  our  great  cities,  who  are 
in  the  same  condition  that  a  majority  of  the 
Israelites  were  when  Moses  came  to  them,  and 
told  the  marvellous  story  of  his  talk  with 
Jehovah,  and  painted  before  their  dim  eyes  the 


72  WHITE    SLAVES 

picture  of  the  Canaan,  and  recounted  to  their 
dull  ears  the  promise  of  their  deliverance  from 
bondage.  Pathetic,  indeed,  is  the  record, 
"  They  hearkened  not  unto  Moses  for  anguish 
of  spirit  and  for  cruel  bondage."  It  is  idle  to 
talk,  as  so  many  newspapers  as  well  as  private 
individuals  do,  as  though  domestic  service 
were  the  cure-all  for  these  half-starving,  under- 
paid women.  A  great  majority  of  the  women 
who  are  slaves  to  these  sweaters,  have  families 
of  little  children  depending  on  them,  that  are  as 
dear  to  their  hearts  as  are  the  children  of  more 
fortunate  mothers  to  them.  Dr.  Barnardo,  of 
London,  who  has  had  a  most  extensive  ex- 
perience among  the  poor,  tells  of  a  poor 
woman,  with  a  husband  lying  disabled  in  the 
hospital,  earning  her  living  by  charing  and  odd 
jobs,  while  she  herself  was  receiving  out-door 
hospital  relief  for  physical  debility.  Driven  at 
last  to  accept  assistance  from  the  relieving  offi- 
cer, she  hastened  home,  placed  the  bread  and 
meat  on  a  table,  and  fell  dead  of  exhaustion. 
Dr.  Barnardo  was  sent  for,  and  beside  the  dead 
body  of  the  mother  he  was  surprised,  as  well 
he  might  be,  to  find  five  well-fed,  chubby  chil- 


REPLY   TO   A   CRITICISM  73 

dren.  The  poor,  slum  mother  had  literally 
starved  herself  to  death  that  her  children  might 
live  !  Truly,  as  Coleridge  says,  "  A  mother  is 
the  holiest  thing  alive  ; "  and  God  never  in- 
tended that  the  almshouse  or  the  orphan  asylum 
should  be  the  only  refuge  held  open  for  a 
mother  who  is  able  and  willing  to  work  to 
support  her  children. 

In  the  ninth  question  our  critic  says:  "  If  her 
work  is  worth  more  than  she  gets,  can  she  not 
get  it?  A  little  inquiry  into  the  condition  of 
the  clothing  trade  and  some  examination  of  the 
facts  might  disclose  to  you  that  the  poor  sew- 
ing-woman is  poor  because  she  sews  poorly, 
and  that  there  is  always  a  scarcity  of  skilful 
and  intelligent  sewing-women,  at  full  wages." 
The  more  thorough  my  examination  into  the 
facts  of  the  case,  the  more  I  am  convinced  that 
the  sweating  system  is  demoralizing  the  entire 
clothing  trade,  as  it  will  every  trade  it  touches. 
Whether  the  woman  sews  poorly  or  not,  she 
does  not,  in  any  class  she  may  be  placed,  re- 
ceive the  wages  to  which  she  is  entitled. 

The  conclusion  of  my  critic's  letter  is,  I 
think,  as  remarkable  as  anything  in  it.  He 


74 


WHITE   SLAVES 


says :  u  My  final  question  is,  how  do  you  pro- 
pose to  help  those  who  are  incapable  of  helping 
themselves,  without  pauperizing  them  yet  more 
than  they  are  pauperized  under  their  present 
conditions  ?  What  will  you  do  when  you  have 


NOliTH   END    JUNK   SHOP. 


destroyed  the  house  and  done  away  with  the 
sweater?"  To  this  part  of  the  concluding 
question  I  simply  say,  I  will  be  a  Christian), 
and  pay  honest  wages  for  honest  work.  But 
the  critic  continues :  "  Are  you  justified,  as  a 


REPLY    TO    A   CRITICISM  75 

Christian  minister,  in  creating  prejudice  and 
arousing  malignant  passion  by  the  use  of  the 
term  4  slave  ?  '  Can  you  defend  or  justify  this 
term  under  the  conditions  as  they  are  stated  in 
the  printed  report  of  your  sermon  ?  I  venture 
to  put  these  questions  to  you  because  I  think 
that  the  dangerous  class  in  this  community  is 
to  be  found  among  persons  who,  without  intelli- 
gence, create  animosity  and,  by  their  method  of 
preaching,  tend  to  retard  rather  than  to  pro- 
mote the  progress  of  the  poor  and  ignorant  in 
this  country." 

My  answer  to  all  that  is,  that,  as  a  Christian 
minister,  I  am  a  follower  of  Him,  who,  stand- 
ing in  the  midst  of  the  self-satisfied  and 
wealthy  oppressors  of  His  times,  exclaimed, 
"  Woe  unto  you,  Pharisees  !  for  ye  tithe  mint 
and  rue  and  all  manner  of  herbs,  and  pass  over 
judgment  and  the  love  of  God."  And  who, 
standing  in  the  audience  of  all  the  people,  said 
unto  His  disciples,  "  Beware  of  the  Scribes 
which  devour  widows'  houses,  and  for  a  show 
make  long  prayers  :  the  same  shall  receive 
greater  damnation ; "  who,  standing  in  the 
presence  of  the  lawyers,  cried  aloud,  "  Woe 


76  WHITE    SLAVES 

unto  you,  also,  ye  lawyers  !  for  ye  lade  men 
with  burdens  grievous  to  be  borne,  and  ye 
yourselves  touch  not  the  burdens  with  one 
of  your  fingers."  I  am  a  follower  of  Him 
who  came  "  not  to  send  peace  on  the  earth, 
but  a  sword."  All  an  infernal  system  of 
oppression,  like  the  sweating  system,  asks,  is 
to  be  let  alone.  To  uncover  its  atrocities  is 
like  turning  over  a  huge  stone  in  the  meadow 
in  springtime,  that  has  been  a  hiding-place 
for  bugs  and  worms  that  nest  away  in  the 
dark.  As  soon  as  the  hot,  searching  sunlight 
finds  them,  they  will  wriggle  and  squirm  in 
agony  until  they  can  crawl  under  cover  again. 
So  I  do  not  wonder  that,  when  the  hideous 
cruelty  of  the  tenement-house  sweat-shop  is 
brought  to  light,  the  sweater  and  all  his 
friends  wriggle  and  squirm  in  an  agony  of  fright 
and  shame.  Neither  am  I  alarmed  that  this 
critic,  as  a  type  of  conservatism,  regards  me  as 
a  member  of  the  most  dangerous  class  in  the 
community.  It  was  ever  thus.  The  old  anti- 
slavery  agitators  were  considered  the  most  dan- 
gerous men  in  the  republic,  and  I  remember 
that  a  very  distinguished  minister  once  bitterly 


REPLY  TO   A  CRITICISM 


77 


regretted  the  agitation  on  the  evils  of  slavery, 
because  he  feared  it  would  destroy  the  prospect 


HOME  OF  THE    MATHERS. 


for  a  revival  of  religion  in  the  city  where  he 
lived. 

If  to  be  a  Christian  minister  is  to  stand  as  a 


78  WHITE    SLAVES 

policeman  to  hold  back  the  righteous  indigna- 
tion of  the  robbed  and  degraded  laborer,  or 
preach  patience  and  contentment  to  empty 
stomachs, — empty  that  the  sweater  may  grow 
rich  and  fat  on  the  toil  of  orphans  and  widows, 
—  then  I  spurn  the  title  as  beneath  the  dignity 
of  my  manhood ;  but  if,  as  I  take  it,  to  be  a 
Christian  minister  is  to  be  like  my  Master,  the 
brother  of  all  men,  rich  or  poor,  standing  for- 
ever as  the  unflinching  enemy  of  oppression 
and  injustice  wherever  found,  as  the  friend  and 
advocate  of  the  defenceless  and  the  weak,  then 
I  am  proud  of  the  title,  and  thank  God  for  its 
unspeakable  privilege. 


IV 

THE   PLAGUE   OF  THE    SWEAT-SHOP 


"Can  the  heart  be  deformed,   and   contract    incurable 
ugliness  and  infirmity  under  the  pressure  of  disproportionate 
misfortune,  like  the  spine  beneath  too  low  a   vault?" 
VICTOR  HUGO:  Les  Miserables. 


IV 

THE   PLAGUE   OF   THE   SWEAT-SHOP 

THE  Klamath  Lake  Indians  in  Oregon  have 
a  strange  and  weird  fashion  of  mourning 
their  dead.  They  dig  a  hole  in  the  ground,  and 
roof  it  over  with  willows,  which  they  cover  with 
dirt,  forming  a  sort  of  underground  cabin.  In 
case  of  death  in  the  family,  the  relatives  go 
into  this  dug-out,  which  is  called  a  "  sweat- 
lodge,"  and  heated  rocks  are  brought  in  and 
heaped  in  the  centre  of  the  lodge,  and  water 
sprinkled  over  them,  so  as  to  fill  the  room  with 
stearn.  In  the  midst  of  this  steam-heated, 
poisonous  air  the  family  hover  around  their 
heap  of  rocks,  and  sweat  for  days  at  a  time,  in 
memory  of  their  departed  friends. 

When  the  mourning  days  are  over,  they  heap 
up  into  a  cairn  beside  the  sweat-lodge  the  stones 
that  have  been  used,  as  a  monument  to  their 
dead. 

81 


82  WHITE    SLAVES 

But  that,  after  all,  is  only  a  brief  torture 
which  is  soon  over,  and  is  constantly  lightened 
by  the  hope  of  relief.  The  sweat-lodge  of  our 
modern  civilization  is  a  much  more  serious 
matter.  The  tortured  victims  who  are  suffering 
there,  are  not  mourning  for  their  dead  friends, 
but  for  the  living,  and  in  the  dark  night  of 
their  sorrow  there  is  no  promise  of  a  brighter 
dawn. 

The  word  "  sweater"  derives  its  origin  from  the 
Anglo-Saxon  word  swat,  and  means  the  separa- 
tion or  extraction  of  labor  or  toil  from  others,  for 
one's  own  benefit.  Any  person  who  employs 
others  to  extract  from  them  surplus  labor  with- 
out compensation,  is  a  sweater.  A  middleman- 
sweater  is  a  person  who  acts  as  a  contractor  of 
such  labor  for  another  man.  The  position  be- 
comes aggravated  when  the  middleman-sweater, 
as  is  usually  the  case  in  the  modern  sweat-shop, 
employs  the  labor  himself,  at  his  own  house, 
for  the  purpose  of  extracting  a  double  quantity 
of  labor,  either  by  lowering  wages  or  working 
longer  hours. 

An  English  writer  gives  this  definition  of 
the  sweating  system :  "One  whereby  the 


THE   PLAGUE   OF   THE    SWEAT-SHOP         83 

middleman  tries  to  get  the  largest  profit,  with 
the  least  labor  and  outlay,  out  of  the  maximum 
labor  of  his  workers."  Another  gives  three 
definitions :  "  First,  one  who  grinds  the  face  of 
the  poor ;  second,  a  man  who  contributes  neither 
capital,  skill,  nor  speculation,  and  yet  gets  a 
profit ;  third,  a  middleman."  Still  another 
describes  it  as  a  systematized  payment  of  un- 
fair wages.  Away  back  in  the  days  of  Queen 
Anne  the  term  " sweater"  was  given  to  a  certain 
class  of  street  ruffian.  The  sweaters  went 
about  in  small  bands,  and,  forming  a  circle 
around  an  inoffensive  wayfarer,  pricked  him 
with  their  swords,  and  compelled  him  to  dance 
till  he  perspired  from  the  exertion.  The  sweater 
is  still  a  ruffian,  though  the  street  is  no  longer 
the  scene  of  action,  but,  in  some  attic  or  tene- 
ment-house bedroom,  he  gathers  his  victims 
from  the  poorest  and  most  helpless  of  our  popu- 
lation. 

It  is  my  purpose,  first  of  all  this  morning,  to 
show  you  something  of  the  growth  and  develop- 
ment of  the  sweat-shop  in  England.  It  is 
reasonable  for  us  to  suppose  that,  if  left  to  itself, 
it  will  produce  the  same  general  results  in  this 


84  WHITE   SLAVES 

country  that  it  has  there.  Fortunately  we  have 
an  abundance  of  data  upon  which  to  form  our 
conclusions. 

There  are  in  the  Boston  Public  Library  five 
ponderous  volumes  containing  the  evidence 
taken  before  a  commission,  appointed  by  the 
English  House  of  Lords,  to  examine  into  the 
sweating  system  of  Great  Britain. 

I  think  it  is  well  for  American  laboring-men 
to  know  that  this  evidence  puts  beyond  ques- 
tion the  fact  that  the  sweating  business,  while 
it  may  begin  with  the  clothing  trade,  by  no 
means  ends  there.  "The  plague  of  the  sweat- 
shop "  is  not  something  of  interest  to  the  tailors 
and  sewing-women  only,  but  is  of  equal  impor- 
tance to  workers  of  every  class.  Take  the 
matchbox  trade;  before  the  sweating  days,  the 
people  who  worked  at  it  received  two  and  three- 
fourths  pence  a  gross.  Now  the  large  con- 
tractors let  and  sub-let  until  it  is  only  one  and 
a  half  pence  a  gross,  and  a  woman  and  a  family 
of  children  have  to  work  all  the  week  to  make 
four  or  five  shillings. 

The  fur  trade  in  Europe  has  been  largely 
driven  into  Whitechapel  sweaters'  shops. 


THE    PLAGUE    OF    THE    SWEAT-SHOP 


85 


They  call  the  sweater  in  this  business  a  "  cham- 
ber master,"  and  in  these  foul  chambers,  in  the 
midst  of  "  bad  smells,  great  heat,  no  ventilation, 
and  fetid  refuse,"  men  and  women  swelter  and 


THE    PEA  NUTTER. 


die,    the    men    getting    ten    shillings,    and   the 
women  about  five  shillings  a  week. 

The  cabinet  and  upholstery  trade  is  not 
exempt.  Sub-contracting  here,  as  in  clothing, 
is  the  first  step  in  sweating.  The  evidence 
shows  that  sweating  began  in  this  business  as 


86  WHITE   SLAVES 

early  as  1855,  but  has  rapidly  increased  under 
pauper  immigration  from  Italy  and  Russia 
since  1880.  Much  of  the  work  is  crowded  into 
garrets  and  cellars,  where  there  are  no  sanitary 
arrangements.  So  universally  is  this  so,  that 
the  sweater  in  this  business  is  called  a  "  garret 
master."  Wages  have  been  brought  down, 
from  forty  to  fifty  shillings  a  week,  to  from 
eighteen  to  twenty  shillings. 

The  boot  and  shoe  trade  has  had  the  same 
history.  Large  numbers  of  foreigners  are  em- 
ployed in  this  work.  The  workers  are  kept  in 
ignorance  of  the  language  and  under  surveil- 
lance, so  as  to  be  taken  advantage  of.  They  are 
not  instructed  in  the  more  skilled  work,  and, 
to  use  the  words  of  one  of  the  witnesses,  "  are 
too  crushed  to  resist."  They  are  compelled  to 
work  from  eighteen  to  twenty  hours  a  day. 
Wages  in  these  sweat-shops  are  from  ten  to 
fifteen  shillings  a  week. 

In  Sheffield,  the  great  cutlery  manufacturing 
city,  the  same  system  is  prevailing,  and  a 
woman  whose  business  was  awl-blade  grinding, 
a  strong  woman  of  forty-five  years  of  age,  testi- 
fied that  she  could  only  make  six  and  a  half 
shillings  per  week. 


THE   PLAGUE    OF   THE    SWEAT-SHOP         87 

Military  harness  and  accoutrements  are  also 
made  by  the  sweaters.  Many  workmen  earn 
only  three  pence  an  hour,  and  complain  that 
they  cannot  live  on  it.  The  nail  trade  is  in  the 
same  condition.  A  man  and  wife  working  to- 
gether make  thirteen  shillings  a  week.  Women's 
earnings  average  from  three  shillings  and  a  half 
to  six  shillings  per  week. 

Large  numbers  of  women  are  only  able  to 
earn  three  shillings  a  week  at  this  business. 
Boys  and  girls  are  paid,  in  a  sweater's  chain- 
shop,  one-half  penny  per  hour. 

A  witness  from  Glasgow  testified  in  regard 
to  the  clothing  shops  of  that  city :  "  It  is  a  rule 
among  the  sweaters  to  give  the  men  some 
money,  a  shilling,  every  night,  to  keep  them 
alive  till  the  next  day.  Some  of  the  men  at  the 
end  of  the  week  are  actually  in  debt  instead  of 
having  anything  coming  to  them.  When  in 
debt,  they  do  not,  as  a  rule,  come  back,  but  go 
to  another  sweater.  The  men  never  actually 
get  any  wages,  but  are  in  debt  from  one  year's 
end  till  another.  All  independence  is  taken 
out  of  the  men  ;  they  are  always  in  the  sweater's 
power." 


88  WHITE   SLAVES 

A  witness  from  Leeds  says :  "  Wages  are 
driven  to  a  starvation  level,  and  workmen  at 
piece-work  compelled  to  excessive  hours.  If 
the  employers  find  a  good  workman,  who  is 
earning  good  wages  by  piece-work,  they  try  to 
reduce  prices.  Time  work  is  healthier,  but  no 
one  would  believe  how  the  men  are  driven  in 
shops  where  time-work  exists." 

Another  gentleman,  testifying  about  his 
investigations  in  Glasgow,  tells  of  a  place  he 
visited,  where  a  sweater  had  between  forty  and 
fifty  women  employed  in  an  old  boiler  shed,  a 
disused  part  of  an  engineer's  shop ;  the  women 
had  to  get  to  it  by  three  wooden  ladders,  and 
had  to  go  through  a  joiner's  shop  in  order  to 
enter  the  workroom.  There  was  no  sanitary 
accommodation  for  these  women  anywhere.  It 
is  a  common  practice  for  sweaters  to  take  on 
learners,  that  is  to  say,  to  employ  young  girls 
for  a  certain  time  to  learn  the  machine  part  of 
the  work ;  but  they  get  no  wages  for  say  five  or 
six  weeks  or  so,  or  two  months,  and  after  that 
time,  if  competent,  they  receive  two  or  three 
shillings  per  week.  But  the  sweater's  trick,  as 
soon  as  the  busy  season  is  over,  is  to  discharge 
all  these  girls  and  take  on  a  new  batch. 


THE   PLAGUE   OF   THE    SWEAT-SHOP         89 

The  practical  slavery  to  which  the  laboring- 
people,  by  the  sweating  system,  have  been  de- 
graded, is  illustrated  on  almost  every  page  of 
the  evidence.  One  witness  testifies :  "  They  do 
almost  as  they  like  with  their  victims.  The 
people  are  afraid  to  give  evidence  against  them. 
The  sweater  is  a  law  unto  himself.  One 
woman  I  came  across  says  she  has  not  been  paid 
for  her  work  done  some  three  years  ago,  on 
some  trivial  pretext  which  the  sweater  made. 
Another  deducted  a  whole  week's  work  from  a 
woman's  wages  because  she  was  ten  minutes 
late,  and  so  aggravated  the  people  in  the  neigh- 
borhood that  they  smashed  his  windows,  show- 
ing the  state  of  things  between  the  sweater  and 
his  people." 

As  one  would  naturally  expect,  moral  degra- 
dation keeps  pace  with  the  outrage  upon  the 
rights  of  the  laborer.  It  is  claimed  that  the 
Jewesses,  who  have  always  had  the  most  unblem- 
ished character  of  any  women  in  the  world,  are 
being  ruined  in  the  sweat-shops  of  London,  where 
they  are  herded  together  with  all  classes  of  men 
in  a  way  which  renders  morality  and  decency 
next  to  impossible.  One  witness  bears  this  ter- 


90  WHITE    SLAVES 

rible  testimony :  "  The  sweating  system,  in  which 
you  have  young  girls  working  with  men  of  all 
nationalities,  and  of  all  degrees  of  intelligence, 
conduces  to  their  being  later  on,  and  they  are 
mostly,  to  my  certain  knowledge,  prostitutes. 
Most  of  the  young  English  girls  whom  we  can 
see  in  the  Strand  and  Oxford  Street  are,  or  have 
been,  tailoresses,  and  the  conditions  conduce  to 
that  effect." 

So  great  and  wide-spread  is  this  question  of 
the  increase  of  immorality  in  England,  under 
the  reign  of  the  sweat-shop,  that  a  barrister-at> 
law,  Mr.  Wm.  Thompson,  has  written  a  novel\ 
entitled,  "  The  Sweater's  Victim,"  which  has  for 
its  burden  the  ruin  of  girls  through  the  "  plague 
of  the  sweat-shop." 

It  is  easy  to  say,  "  Oh,  well,  these  horrible 
things  you  are  telling  us  about 'belong  to  the 
Old  World !  "  I  would  to  God  they  did  belong 
to  the  Old  World  alone,  but  the  horrible  truth 
is,  that  this  vicious  system  is  like  a  banyan-tree 
that  has  run  its  roots  under  the  sea,  and  is 
coining  up,  and  blossoming,  and  flourishing  in 
all  our  great  American  cities.  Listen  to  this 
description  of  the  slaves  of  the  sweat-shop  in 


THE    PLAGUE    OF    THE    SWEAT-SHOP         91 

New  York,  given  by  the  New  York  Herald : 
"  In  the  lower  portion  of  the  great  east  side  of 
this  city,  are  hundreds  of  tall,  ill-appearing  ten- 
ement houses,  in  which  thousands  of  half-starved, 
sunken-eyed  men  and  women  are  crowded  into 
small,  foul,  over-heated  rooms,  working  day  and 
night  for  just  enough  to  keep  body  and  soul  to- 
gether. Scattered  among  the  workers  are  dirty 
children,  and  sometimes  cats  and  dogs.  Every- 
thing in  these  places  has  to  stand  aside  for  work. 
It  is  work,  work,  work,  day  and  night,  year  in 
and  year  out.  In  these  over-crowded  rooms  the 
air  is  poisoned  with  the  heat  from  the  stoves, 
the  steam  from  the  cooking,  and  the  fumes 
of  oil  and  gas.  Very  few  of  the  toilers  can 
speak  English.  They  are  the  most  wretched- 
looking,  miserably  -  paid  class  of  workers  in 
America.  They  are  foreigners,  and  come  chiefly 
from  Russia  and  Poland.  No  sunshine  enters 
into  their  lives.  Their  existence  is  one  hard, 
deep,  grinding  toil.  They  have  no  hope  of 
brighter  days  to  come.  As  they  have  worked 
for  years,  so  they  expect  to  work  in  the  future. 
But  the  sweater  does  not  care.  He  has  his 
contracts  with  the  manufacturers.  Every  day 


92 


WHITE    SLAVES 


great  bundles  of  clothing  are  dumped  into  these 
dens,  and  then  the  slaves  are  driven  at  full-speed 


A    SWEAT-SHOP. 


to  make  them  up.     Competition  is   keen,  but 
the  sweater  makes  money." 

The  Journeymen  Tailors'  National  Union,  in 
its  fifth  annual  report,  describes  in  detail  one 


THE   PLAGUE   OF   THE   SWEAT-SHOP          93 

of  these  New  York  sweat-shops,  similar  to  those 
which  the  recent  commission,  appointed  by  the 
Governor  of  Massachusetts,  found  to  be  the 
manufactories  of  enormous  quantities  of  cloth- 
ing for  Boston  firms  :  "  On  the  first  floor,  which 
was  occupied  by  two  families,  was  a  contractor, 
or  6  sweater,'  who  made  overcoats.  In  the 
front  room,  8x16  ft.,  eight  full-grown  men  were 
at  work,  some  on  sewing-machines,  a  man  press- 
ing, and  others  finishing.  They  were  hollow- 
cheeked  and  cadaverous.  Trousers  and  under- 
shirts were  their  only  apparel.  In  the  rear  room, 
9x14,  were  six  other  men,  almost  identical  in 
appearance  with  those  in  the  front.  All  were 
working  as  if  for  dear  life. 

"  This  place  was  simply  indescribable  in  its 
filthiness.  The  only  household  furniture  dis- 
cernible (for  the  contractor  and  his  family  lived 
in  the  rooms),  were  a  bedstead  and  a  child's 
crib  in  one  of  the  two  dark,  so-called  bedrooms. 
Bedding  and  overcoats  were  piled  up  together. 
The  floors  were  four  inches  deep  with  dirt 
and  cotton  battings  and  scraps  of  linings.  The 
ceilings  and  woodwork  looked  as  though  they 
had  not  seen  a  brush  since  the  house  was  built 


94  WHITE   SLAVES 

years  ago.  Water  from  the  floor  above  had 
leaked  through  the  ceiling,  but  it  seemed  to 
make  no  difference.  One  stove  was  used  by 
the  pressers  and  the  cook.  It  did  not  appear 
that  there  was  any  regular  meal  hour.  There 
was  a  table  littered  with  dirty  dishes,  morsels 
of  food,  and  scraps  of  coats.  One  man  was 
seated,  eating  out  of  a  dish  with  his  fingers, 
without  the  aid  of  spoon,  knife,  or  fork.  As 
soon  as  he  had  finished,  he  merely  wiped 
his  hands  on  some  cotton  batting,  and  pro- 
ceeded with  his  work.  The  poor  creatures 
were  haggard  and  apparently  stupid.''  What 
wonder  ? 

Dr.  George  C.  Stiebling,  of  New  York,  who 
accompanied  the  recent  Boston  investigating 
committee,  says,  in  an  affidavit  made  after  a 
careful  investigation,  that  the  New  York  sweat- 
shops "  in  which  clothing  is  manufactured,  and 
which  serve  at  the  same  time  as  dwelling-rooms 
for  the  bosses,  their  families,  and  boarders,  are 
overcrowded,  ill-ventilated,  over-heated,  full  of 
dirt,  filth,  vermin  and  stench,  and  that,  conse- 
quently, they  are  in  a  most  unwholesome,  health- 
destroying  and  disease-breeding  condition."  The 


THE   PLAGUE   OF   THE   SWEAT-SHOP         95 

doctor,  speaking  of  one  particular  case,  says: 
"  On  the  fourth  floor  I  found  four  very 
small  rooms,  occupied  by  five  sewing-machines, 
twenty-four  working  hands,  and  the  family  of 
the  boss  consisting  of  himself,  wife,  and  five 
living  children.  The  mother  reported  to  affiant 
that,  within  the  last  few  years,  six  of  her  chil- 
dren had  died  of  various  diseases  here  in  the 
same  place."  Relying  upon  these  and  other 
facts,  which  he  relates,  the  Doctor  declares  it  to 
be  his  deliberate  conclusion,  as  a  medical  man, 
that  uthe  dust,  filth,  and  dirt,  accumulated  in 
the  'sweating  dens'  he  has  visited  and  exam- 
ined, contain  the  germs  of  the  prevailing  infec- 
tious diseases,  such  as  diphtheria,  scarlatina, 
measles,  erysipelas,  and  smallpox,  and  that  the 
clothing  manufactured  in  these  shops  is  impreg- 
nated with  such  germs,  and  consequently  may 
transmit  and  spread  the  aforesaid  diseases  to 
persons  who  handle  and  wear  it." 

These  places  referred  to  in  this  affidavit  by 
Dr.  Stiebling,  who  is  a  wealthy  and  respectable 
medical  practitioner,  are  places  where  goods  are 
made  almost  exclusively  for  Boston  houses. 

Another  physician  of   standing   and  repute, 


96  WHITE   SLAVES 

Dr.  Markierez,  who  made  an  investigation  of 
the  sweating  district,  in  connection  with  a  com- 
mission from  the  advisory  board  of  the  opera- 
tive tailors  of  Boston,  in  August,  1889,  states 
that  the  section  of  New  York  city  in  which 
the  tenement-house  system  of  clothing  manu- 
facture is  carried  on,  is  filthy  and  infested  with 
vermin ;  and  he  further  affirms  that  the  sanitary 
condition  of  these  tenement  houses  is  so  low 
that  the  death  rate  is  frightful  and  almost 
beyond  comprehension. 

That  the  sweating  system  in  New  York  de- 
grades the  men  and  women  employed  in  the 
sweatshops,  may  be  inferred  from  the  fact  that 
men  and  women  to  the  number  of  twelve  have 
been  found  sleeping  together  in  one  of  these 
workrooms.  The  tenement-house  factories  are 
so  crowded  that  no  such  thing  as  privacy  or 
modesty,  on  the  part  of  men  or  women,  is  possi- 
ble ;  the  usual  water-closet  is  a  wooden  bucket 
upon  every  landing,  which  fills  the  air  with  its 
vile  and  death-breeding  stench. 

The  New  York  sweaters,  like  some  of  their 
English  prototypes,  take  advantage  of  the 
newly  arrived  foreigners  who  do  not  under- 


THE    PLAGUE    OF    THE    SWEAT-SHOP         97 

stand  the  language.  Green  hands,  who  have 
just  arrived  at  Castle  Garden,  are  pure  gold  for 
the  contractors.  Full-grown  men  among  these 
will  receive,  probably,  two  dollars  a  week,  but 
one  case  was  discovered  where  a  man  was  only 
paid  eighty  cents  for  his  week's  labor.  A  four- 
teen-year-old boy  was  found  in  a  Jewish  sweat- 
shop, who,  although  he  had  been  in  the  shop 
eight  months,  was  still  receiving  only  his  board. 
If  that  is  not  slavery,  what  is  it  ? 

But  now  let  us  come  to  Boston.  To  begin 
with,  I.  S.  Mullen,  State  Inspector  of  factories 
and  workshops,  testified,  before  the  committee 
on  public  health,  of  the  Massachusetts  Legisla- 
ture, on  the  30th  of  last  March,  that  he  had 
found  two  places  in  Boston  as  bad  as  anything 
he  had  seen  in  New  York.  How  much  that 
means,  you  can  imagine,  after  the  descriptions 
I  have  given. 

The  State  inspectors  of  factories  and  public 
buildings,  in  their  report  to  Chief  Wade  of  the 
Massachusetts  district  police,  say  that  "  the  con- 
fidential clerk  of  perhaps  the  largest  concern  in 
town  assured  us  that  but  a  small  part  of  their 
goods  were  made  in  New  York,  and  that  in 


98 


WHITE   SLAVES 


shops ;  that  all  of  their  nice  work  was  done  in 
Boston ;  admitted  the  fact  of  tenement-house 
clothing,  but  thought  the  greater  part  of  it  was 
worn  in  New  York,  and  wished  that  its  manu- 


PAUL,  REVERE  HOUSE,  NORTH  SQUARE. 

facture  could  be  prohibited  by  law.  This  gen- 
tleman, as  well  as  some  others  questioned, 
believed  that  relatively  there  was  as  much 
tenement-house  work  done  in  Boston  as  in 
New  York,  and  under  nearly  as  unwholesome 
conditions." 


THE   PLAGUE    OF    THE    SWEAT-SHOP         99 

The  Boston  Evening  Record,  of  September 
29,  1890,  speaks  as  follows  of  Boston  sweating : 
"  The  shops  are  scattered  all  over  the  city 
proper,  and  a  visit  to  one  is  a  visit  to  all.  The 
cheapest  shop  in  the  city  is  on  lower  Hanover 
Street.  The  work  is  done  in  a  square,  low- 
studded  room  about  twenty-four  feet  square. 
Within  this  space  are  sixteen  women  and  three 
men  at  work.  There  are  also  half  a  dozen  sew- 
ing-machines, a  large  stove  (kept  in  full  blast  to 
heat  the  flat-irons,  necessary  at  every  stage  of 
clothing  manufacture),  two  pressing-machines, 
and  piles  of  unfinished  clothing.  Two  windows 
illumine  the  room,  furnishing  light  for  the  nine- 
teen workers.  Working  hours  are  from  seven 
A.  M.  to  six  P.  M.,  with  no  clipping  of  time  at 
either  end  of  the  day.  The  proprietor  is  a 
Hebrew.  One  of  the  operatives  thus  describes 
the  life  :  4  We  make  from  two  dollars  and  a 
half  to  four  dollars  a  week,  depending  on  how 
strong  we  are,  but  none  of  us  can  make  the  last 
figure  very  long.  The  air  is  bad,  and  the  room 
is  kept  too  hot.  In  the  warm,  summer  days  the 
heat  was  something  awful.  Every  little  while 
there  is  a  cut-down,  and  about  once  in  so  often 


100  WHITE    SLAVES 

the  boss  fails,  and  leaves  the  girls  in  the  lurch 
about  their  pay. 

"  ;  Another  bad  thing  is  the  "  sample  "  game. 
A  small  lot  of  garments  are  brought  in,  which, 
we  are  told,  must  be  made  up  very  carefully. 
We  are  made  to  rip,  and  do  work  over,  to  suit 
the  notions  of  the  big  firms,  who  want  the  gar- 
ments to  send  out  on  the  road.  It  takes  twice 
as  long  to  make  such  a  coat,  but  we  get  no 
more  for  it.  Of  course  the  game  is  played  on 
us  when  the  coats  are  not  really  samples.  If 
we  accidentally  scorch  the  cloth  a  little,  in  press- 
ing, we  have  to  pay  for  that.' ' 

An  officer  of  the  Operatives'  Union  puts  the 
number  of  sweat-shops  in  Boston  at  one  hundred 
and  fifty,  but  this  does  not  include  the  smaller 
tenement-house  shops  that  are  beginning  to 
develop  here  very  rapidly. 

I  have,  myself,  visited  a  number  of  these  shops 
during  the  past  few  weeks.  I  will  describe  a 
few  of  them  very  briefly.  Here  is  one  in  two 
rooms.  There  is  no  light  except  from  the  end  of 
the  room,  which  contains  twenty-three  people, 
men,  women,  and  little  girls.  I  am  satisfied  that 
some  of  the  girls  could  not  have  been  more 


THE    PLAGUE   OF   THE    SWEAT-SHOP     101 

than  twelve  or  thirteen.  One  of  the  women 
had  a  little  baby  which,  though  almost  entirely 
naked,  was  crying  from  the  heat  and  poisonous 
air.  The  place  did  not  look  as  if  it  had  been 
swept  for  weeks.  The  clothing,  both  finished 
and  unfinished,  was  piled  up  in  every  direction, 
and  workers  walked  over  it  with  their  sweaty 
feet,  for  they  wore  only  such  clothing  as  was 
absolutely  indispensable.  The  stench  of  the 
place  was  sickening  in  the  extreme. 

I  went  into  another  place,  where  there  were 
eighteen  men  and  twelve  girls.  As  near  as  I 
could  judge,  the  ages  of  the  girls  were  from  ten 
to  fifteen.  The  men  were  nearly  all  smoking, 
and  that,  together  with  the  heat  from  the  fire 
necessary  for  the  pressing,  made  an  atmosphere 
that  was  almost  intolerable,  even  for  a  few 
moments.  I  was  not  astonished  that  the  girls 
looked  pallid  and  sickly.  There  was  only  one 
filthy  water-closet  for  men  and  women. 

I  was  in  a  little  tenement-house  Jew  shop 
where  a  man  and  four  boys  were  making  knee 
pants  in  a  bedroom.  The  clothing  was  piled 
upon  the  bed,  which  was  one  of  the  filthiest 
assortments  of  tenement-house  bedding  that  I 


102 


WHITE   SLAVES 


have  ever  seen  —  and  that  is  saying  a  great  deal. 
The  largest  shop  I  visited  was  one  in  which 
there  were  seventy-nine  people  employed. 
They  occupied  four  rooms.  The  rooms  were 
quite  large,  but  were  filthy  almost  beyond  de- 
scription. The  coal  was  piled  up  in  huge  heaps 


REAR   OF   NORTH   END    TENEMENT   HOUSE. 

on  the  floor;  ashes,  both  in  barrels  and  heaps, 
were  scattered  about ;  clothing  was  flung  over 
the  floors  everywhere ;  dirt  and  scraps  of  cloth 
literally  made  a  carpet  for  these  rooms.  These 
seventy-nine  people  were  about  evenly  divided 


THE  PLAGUE   OF   THE   SWEAT-SHOP       103 

between  the  sexes,  and  yet  for  all  this  herd  of 
humanity  there  was  only  one  water-closet,  the 
door  of  which  stood  open,  on  the  landing,  and 
the  poisonous  stench  filled  all  the  rooms  ;  the 
floor  about  it  was  damp  and  filthy.  How  any 
woman  or  girl  could  work  in  this  shop,  and  re- 
tain her  self-respect,  I  do  not  understand.  I 
estimated  that  at  least  twenty  boys  and  girls  of 
this  company  were  under  fifteen ;  one  little  boy 
sitting  on  the  floor  hard  at  work  was  almost 
crying  with  a  headache.  The  men  were  smok- 
ing cigarettes  here,  as  in  other  places,  and  this 
added  to  the  poisonous  condition  of  the  air. 
The  majority  of  these  people  could  not  speak 
English.  Taken  altogether,  they  were  a  hope- 
less-looking lot.  Many  of  them  had  a  brutal, 
hunted  look  in  their  faces. 

Remember,  this  is  not  Glasgow,  or  London, 
or  New  York,  but  in  the  heart  of  Boston,  in  the 
month  of  June,  1891.  It  is  easy  to  say  that 
these  people  are  foreigners,  and  that  they  had 
poor  wages  where  they  came  from ;  that  they 
are  probably  as  well  off  here  as  they  were  at 
home,  and  that  they  are  too  ignorant  and  brutal 
to  suffer,  as  more  refined  and  cultivated  people 


104  WHITE   SLAVES 

would.  Putting  all  other  questions  aside  for  a 
moment,  let  us  remember  that  these  people  are 
setting  up  a  standard  of  living  in  our  midst, 
which,  if  permitted  to  become  established,  will 
dictate  its  cruel  laws  to  all  the  laboring  people 
in  the  community. 


COMMONWEALTH  AVENUE. 


If  this  system  is  allowed  to  go  on,  there  are 
people  living  in  luxury,  who  are  indifferently 
pooh-poohing  this  whole  question,  whose  grand- 
children will  be  starved  to  death  in  a  sweat-shop. 

No  investment  exacts  such  cruel  usury  as 
indifference  to  injustice.  A  wrong,  uncared 


THE  PLAGUE   OF   THE   SWEAT-SHOP       105 

for  in  a  North  End  tenement  house  will 
avenge  itself,  sooner  or  later,  on  Beacon  Hill 
or  Commonwealth  Avenue. 

I  thank  God  for  every  indication  of  discon- 
tent, on  the  part  of  laboring  men  and  women,  at 
conditions  which  cramp  or  fetter  the  free  utter- 
ance of  their  manhood  or  womanly  glory.  In 
that  divine  discontent  is  the  hope  of  the  race. 
Our  own  Lowell  sings :  — 

"  The  hope  of  truth  grows  stronger  day  by  day. 
I  hear  the  soul  of  man  around  me  waking, 
Like  a  great  sea  its  frozen  fetters  breaking, 
And  flinging  up  to  heaven  its  sunlit  spray, 
Tossing  huge  continents  in  scornful  play, 
And  crushing  them  with  din  of  grinding  thunder 
That  makes  old  emptinesses  stare  in  wonder. 
The  memory  of  a  glory  passed  away 
Lingers  in  every  heart,  as  in  the  shell 
Kesounds  the  by-gone  freedom  of  the  sea. 
And  every  hour  new  signs  of  promise  tell 
That  the  great  soul  shall  once  again  be  free ; 
For  high  and  yet  more  high  the  murmurs  swell 
Of  inward  strife  for  truth  and  liberty." 


THE    RELATION    OF    WAGES    TO 
MORALS 


"  When  the  toiler's  heart  you  clutch, 
Conscience  is  not  valued  much ; 
He  recks  not  a  bloody  smutch 

On  his  gold ; 

Everything  to  you  he  defers, 
You  are  potent  reasoners ; 
At  your  whisper  Treason  stirs, 
Hunger  and  Cold! " 

JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL. 


THE   EELATION   OF   WAGES   TO    MORALS 

WHEN  Henry  W.  Grady,  the  brilliant 
Southern  orator,  was  in  Boston  on  his 
last  visit,  only  a  few  weeks  before  his  sad  and 
untimely  death,  he  charmed  us  all  by  his  en- 
trancing word-picture  of  a  happy  country 
home.  The  fields,  the  lowing  kine,  the  well- 
appointed  farmhouse,  the  noble  farmer,  the 
contented  matron,  the  dutiful  children,  the  hos- 
pitable welcome  of  their  guest,  the  cheerful 
and  reverent  evening  worship  —  all  these  and 
more  stand  out  on  the  glowing  canvas  under 
his  words,  as  I  have  myself  seen  them  in  real 
life  a  thousand  times.  About  such  a  home,  and 
the  toilers  that  support  it,  there  is  a  halo  of 
glory.  There  is,  however,  a  great  deal  said 
about  the  dignity  of  labor  which  is  nothing 
more  than  oratorical  commonplace  —  the  mean- 
ingless froth  of  the  rhetorician.  There  is  no 
109 


110  WHITE   SLAVES 

dignity  about  labor  in  itself.  What  is  there 
about  piling  bricks  on  top  of  each  other,  or 
mixing  mortar,  or  sewing  .blue  denim  into 
overalls,  or  trading  earthen  jars  for  nickel  coin, 
that  has  about  it  any  inherent  dignity  ?  It  is 
only  as  there  is  mixed  with  the  mortar,  or 
builded  with  the  bricks,  the  holy  cement  of  a 
moral  purpose ;  only  as  there  is  stitched  into 
the  cloth  the  diviner  thread  of  hopeful  love ; 
only  as  the  deed  gathers  the  aroma  of  an  aspir- 
ing human  life,  is  it  a  dignified  transaction. 
But  when  you  make  of  the  laborer  a  slave,  de- 
grade his  work  to  a  mere  fight  for  bread,  harass 
him  by  continual  debt,  put  him  in  a  vile  tene- 
ment house  that  smothers  all  holy  ambition, 
labor  has  no  longer  dignity,  it  smells  rather  of 
the  dungeon  and  the  pit. 

Honest  labor,  continued  through  reasonable 
hours,  paid  at  a  rate  which  assures  a  wholesome 
support,  is  ennobling ;  but  overwork,  that  is 
hopeless  of  comfortable  reward,  is  degrading  in 
the  extreme.  On  the  continent  of  Europe, 
where  men  and  women  work  in  the  factories 
for  fourteen  and  sixteen  hours  in  a  day,  the 
laborers  are  reduced  simply  to  machines.  They 


RELATION    OF    WAGES    TO   MORALS        111 

have  a  wooden  look,  when  you  meet  them  on 
the  streets,  that  is  startling  to  an  American 
observer.  Every  observant  European  travelling 
in  this  country  notices  the  difference  in  the  in- 


THE   FIND.7 


telligence  of  the  average  countenance  of  Amer- 
ican working-people,  both  among  men  and 
women.  But  how  long  can  we  expect  that  to 
last  if  the  dominion  of  the  sweater  is  to  spread 
in  our  midst?  Reduce  wages  to  the  point 
where  the  laborer  has  to  either  remain  at  the 


112  WHITE   SLAVES 

shop  or  take  his  work  home  and  work  into  the 
night,  and  drive  it  on  through  Sunday  as  well, 
and  you  simply  brutalize  the  workman. 

It  is  idle,  and  pharisaical  as  well,  for  us  to 
shrug  our  shoulders  and  say  this  is  not  a  ques- 
tion for  the  pulpit.  So  intimate  is  the  relation 
between  the  body  and  the  soul,  that  every  ques- 
tion which  has  to  do  with  the  feeding  or  cloth- 
ing of  a  human  body  is,  at  the  last  analysis,  a 
moral  question.  The  great  generals  of  history 
have  understood  that  the  moral  force  of  their 
armies  depended  largely  upon  the  provision 
wagon.  Frederick  the  Great  once  wrote : 
"  Where  one  desires  a  solid  basis  for  the  good 
organization  of  an  army,  it  is  necessary  to  have 
regard  to  the  stomach."  Napoleon  once  said: 
"  The  soldier  has  his  heart  in  his  abdomen ; " 
and  Von  Moltke  adds  his  testimony :  "  In  a 
campaign  no  food  is  costly  except  that  which  is 
bad." 

One  of  the  greatest  of  physiologists,  Moles- 
chott,  says :  "  Courage,  readiness,  and  activity 
depend  in  a  great  measure  upon  a  healthy  and 
abundant  nourishment.  Hunger  makes  heart 
and  head  empty.  No  force  of  will  can  make 


DELATIONS   OF    WAGES   TO   MORALS      113 

up  for  an  impoverished  blood,  a  badly  nour- 
ished muscle,  or  an  exhausted  nerve."  All 
these  tend  to  the  one  conclusion,  that  the  moral 
and  intellectual  life  is  very  largely  subject  to 
physiological  conditions.  A  man,  of  course, 
may  be  a  scoundrel  and  well-fed ;  but,  on  the 
other  hand,  poor  food  and  undue  exposure  to 
cold  and  heat  have  tremendous  influence  in 
breaking  down  the  resistance-power  against 
temptation  to  evil.  Courage  is  the  safeguard 
both  of  truth  and  honesty. 

Break  down  a  man's  courage  by  overwork, 
bad  food,  and  poisonous  air,  and  you  have 
opened  the  way  for  lying,  theft,  and  a  whole 
brood  of  vicious  tendencies.  You  may  find 
this  strongly  illustrated  in  Hugo's  story  of 
Jean  Valjean,  who  in  his  despair  begins  his 
criminal  career  by  stealing  a  loaf  of  bread  to 
keep  his  sister's  children  from  starving. 
.  We  get  so  in  the  habit  of  thinking  of  drunk- 
enness as  the  chief  cause  of  poverty,  as  it  un- 
doubtedly is,  —  for  when  a  man  drinks  to 
excess  his  whole  character  falls  to  pieces  like  a 
child's  house  of  cards,  —  that  we  forget,  or  fail 
to  perceive,  the  companion  fact,  that  poverty  is, 


114  WHITE    SLAVES 

in  turn,  a  great  and  serious  factor  in  the  spread 
of  drunkenness. 

When  a  man  or  woman  is  physically  ex- 
hausted, there  is  a  natural  craving  for  stimu- 
lant, and  the  power  of  resistance  is  reduced  to 
the  lowest  point,  if  not  to  zero.  It  will  not  do 
for  us  to  forget  that  the  drink  habit  is  often  a 
symptom  of  exhaustion.  Here  are  a  man  and  a 
woman  who  receive  such  low  wages  that  they 
are  driven  into  unhealthy  quarters.  They 
ought  to  have  four  or  five  rooms  in  order  to 
the  least  approach  to  wholesome  living ;  but 
poverty  herds  them  in  two,  or  it  may  be  only 
one,  for  within  the  past  month  I  have  myself 
seen  many  families  of  father  and  mother  and  as 
many  as  five  children  packed  into  one  little 
room,  in  one  case  only  seven  by  nine  feet.  The 
air  is  poisonous ;  and,  after  the  rent  is  paid,  the 
food-money  is  insufficient,  and  sickness  is  the 
result.  I  do  not  mean  that  large  numbers  of 
people  in  Boston  are  literally  starved  to  death 
for  lack  of  bread ;  but  I  do  mean  that  thousands 
of  men  and  women  and  children  in  this  city  are 
compelled  to  eat  such  a  quality  of  food  that 
the  result  is  a  condition  of  mind  and  body 


RELATION    OF    WAGES    TO    MORALS      115 

which  is  subject  to  an  unsatiable  thirst  for 
strong  drink,  and  makes  drunkards  of  those 
who  would  otherwise  be  sober  people. 

In  company  with  two  gentlemen  I  was  exam- 
ining a  filthy  court  a  few  weeks  ago,  when,  in 
the  rear  of  a  bake-shop  under  a  shed,  we  noticed 
some  curious  machinery,  and  were  looking  at  it 
rather  inquisitively  when  a  young  lad  came  up 
out  of  the  bakery  in  the  cellar,  and,  in  answer 
to  our  inquiries,  said  in  a  matter-of-course  way 
that  it  was  a  mill  for  grinding  old  bread  and 
stale  crackers  into  flour,  which  was  again  baked 
into  a  cheaper  class  of  bread.  This  grade  of 
flour  may  make  a  very  nourishing  food,  but  the 
incident  left  a  most  unpleasant  taste  in  my 
mouth. 

It  is  a  commonplace  thing,  I  know,  to  say 
that  the  American  home  is  the  strongest  for- 
tress of  our  civilization.  It  is  one  of  those 
things,  however,  that  needs  to  be  said  over  and 
over  again.  Before  the  church  or  the  state 
there  must  be  the  home.  Destroy  that,  and 
the  whole  fabric  of  our  civilization  will  come 
crashing  to  the  ground  in  a  common  ruin.  But 
the  reduction  of  wages  below  the  comfort  point 


116  WHITE   SLATES 

means,  inevitably,  the  deterioration  of  the 
home.  The  father  and  mother  and  the  children 
must  know  each  other,  if  the  home  is  to  be 
welded  together  with  mutual  love.  Acquaint- 
ance of  that  character,  however,  requires  that 


THE   NOilTH   END   MISSION. 


they  shall  be  together  under  such  conditions 
that  they  may  come  to  enjoy  the  gifts  and 
talents  that  each  possess.  But  wages  are  being 
reduced  to  the  point  where  the  home  is  only  a 
sleeping-barrack  and  a  lunch-counter  for  supper 
and  breakfast.  Remember  that  poor  wages 


BELATION   OF   WAGES    TO   MORALS        117 

mean  long  hours ;  and  long  hours  that  exhaust 
all  the  energy  of  the  laborer  mean  ignorance ; 
and  ignorance,  when  it  is  finished,  means  immo- 
rality. 

There  is  only  about  so  much  vital  force  in 
the  average  human  being.  If  all  this  force  is 
put  into  one's  daily  toil,  there  is  none  left  for 
helpful  conversation,  for  sympathetic  com- 
munion at  home,  for  uplifting  reading,  or  for 
worship.  Persevere  in  that  course,  and  you 
reach  barbarism  :  the  road  faces  that  way. 

Insufficient  wages  have  their  relation  to  the 
demoralization  of  laboring-people  in  many  ways 
that  are  not  perceived  by  people  who  look  no 
deeper  than  the  surface.  The  city  abounds  in 
organized  firms  of  sharpers  who  prey  upon 
the  necessities  of  the  hard-pinched  laborer.  If 
you  will  examine  a  copy  of  "The  Banker 
and  Tradesman,"  published  in  this  city,  and 
look  down  the  column  of  chattel-mortgages, 
for  any  week,  you  will  see  a  very  innocent- 
appearing  column,  to  the  unadvised,  but  one 
that  is  full  of  devilish  wickedness  to  a  man 
who  has  been  behind  the  scenes.  If  there  be 
anything  in  Boston  that  can  rival  the  cruelty  of 


118  WHITE   SLAVES 

the  tenement-house  sweat-shop,  you  will  find  it 
in  the  dens  of  some  chattel-mortgage  sharks, 
whose  business  methods  I  have  investigated. 
Here  is  a  woman  who  made  her  living  by  mak- 
ing overalls  at  five  cents  a  pair.  Times,  of 
course,  were  always  hard  with  her.  Her  hus- 
band was  out  of  work  a  good  part  of  the  time. 
At  a  period  when  they  were  in  a  specially  hard 
place,  they  borrowed  ten  dollars  of  one  of  these 
human  sharks.  They  were  to  pay  two  dollars 
a  month  interest  on  it.  If  at  any  time  it  ran 
over  two  or  three  days  and  the  interest  was  not 
paid,  so  that  the  collector  had  to  call  for  it,  he 
charged  and  collected  two  dollars  extra  for  call- 
ing. I  should  have  stated  that  this  money  was 
secured  by  a  chattel-mortgage  upon  every  article 
of  household  furniture  they  possessed.  These 
mortgages  are  ironclad,  and  put  the  people  at 
the  mercy  of  the  man  who  holds  them.  In  the 
course  of  fifteen  months,  under  cover  of  this 
loan  of  ten  dollars,  this  firm  managed  to  squeeze 
forty  dollars  out  of  the  hard  earnings  of  these 
people ;  and  then  they  came  to  foreclose  the 
mortgage  and  take  away  the  furniture,  and 
would  have  removed  every  household  article 


RELATION   OF   WAGES   TO   MORALS        119 

they  possessed,  had  not  the  police-officer  on  the 
beat,  a  man  of  noble  heart  and  generous  in- 
stincts, stepped  in  and  agreed  to  be  responsible 
personally  for  the  amount.  Here  is  another 
case,  all  of  the  papers  of  which  are  now  in  my 
my  hands :  A  man  and  his  wife  borrowed 
twenty  dollars ;  the  firm  charged  two  dollars  for 
making  out  the  papers,  so  that  the  note  read 
twenty-two  dollars.  The  agent  called  on  them 
once,  and  charged  two  dollars  for  that.  In  the 
course  of  ten  months  they  paid  twenty  dollars 
interest.  The  matter  then  came  to  the  attention 
of  the  secretary  of  a  charitable  association,  who 
forced  the  brokers  to  settle  up  the  case  for  six 
dollars.  I  know  of  another  case  of  a  Swede 
family  who  "got  behind,"  and  could  not  pay  the 
rent.  Sickness  came  upon  them,  and  they  bor- 
rowed fifty  dollars.  In  a  little  over  a  year  they 
paid  sixty  dollars  interest,  but  the  principal  had 
not  been  reduced  a  dollar. 

Some  of  the  instalment  firms  are  just  as  bad, 
and  many  times  are  in  league  with  these  sharp- 
ers. A  case  has  come  to  my  knowledge  where 
a  man  with  a  wife  and  family  of  five  children 
bought  furniture  amounting  to  a  hundred  and 


120  WHITE   SLAVES 

thirty-five  dollars.  After  he  had  paid  seventy 
dollars,  he  was  taken  sick  and  had  to  go  to  the 
hospital.  The  wife  was  unable  to  meet  the 
instalments  promptly,  and  the  firm  threatened 
to  take  away  her  furniture.  She  asked  the  agent 
of  a  charitable  organization  to  intercede  for  her. 
This  gentleman  wrote  to  the  firm  and  begged 
them  to  postpone  their  foreclosure,  and  merci- 
fully give  the  poor  family  a  little  more  time. 
But  this  they  absolutely  refused  to  do,  and 
came  in  the  midst  of  the  raw  winds  of  March, 
and  took  all  the  household  furniture  away,  in- 
cluding the  stove  and  the  loaf  of  bread  in  the 
oven.  These  are  not  hearsay  stories,  but  facts 
that  can  be  proved  by  undoubted  evidence. 

Women  are  the  greatest  sufferers  from  de- 
preciation of  wages.  Commissioner  Carroll 
Wright's  report  on  the  working- worn  en  in  great 
cities,  given  to  the  public  two  years  since, 
contains  some  interesting  facts.  The  investiga- 
tion on  which  the  report  is  based  covered 
twenty-two  of  the  larger  cities  of  the  United 
States,  and  three  hundred  and  forty-two  distinct 
industries,  excluding  the  professional  and  semi- 
professional  callings,  such  as  teaching,  stenog- 


KELATION   OF   WAGES   TO   MORALS        121 

raphy,  typewriting,  and  telegraphy.  The  total 
number  of  women  individually  interviewed  was 
17,427. 

This  is  only  six  or  seven  per  cent  of  the 
whole  number  of  women  engaged  in  the  class 
of  work  indicated,  but  the  Commissioner  de- 
clares that  the  investigation  is  representative  so 
far  as  the  number  of  women  whose  affairs  enter 
into  it  is  to  be  considered.  The  average  age  of 
the  women  is  given  as  twenty-two  years  and 
seven  months,  though  the  concentration  is  great- 
est at  the  age  of  eighteen.  .  .  .  The  general 
average  at  the  beginning  of  work  is  put  at  fif- 
teen years  and  four  months. 

A  great  majority  of  the  women  interviewed 
are  single,  and  the  average  weekly  earnings  for 
the  cities,  as  a  whole,  are  five  dollars  and 
twenty-four  cents.  Take  your  pencil  and 
count  it  up  —  room-rent,  board,  and  clothing  — 
and  see  how  much  you  have  left  for  books  or 
music,  recreation  or  religion. 

The  twentieth  annual  report  of  the  Massa- 
chusetts Bureau  of  Labor  Statistics  for  last  year 
shows  not  only  the  poor  pay  of  women,  but 
the  cruel  and  unjust  disparity  of  wages  be- 


122  WHITE   SLAVES 

tween  men  and  women  doing  the  same  work. 
Beginning  with  the  lowest  rate  of  wages,  for 
the  first  comparison  of  relative  male  and  female 
pay,  it  appears  that  of  actual  wages  paid  to 
248,200  employes  of  both  sexes,  8.99  per  cent 
of  all  males  receive  less  than  five  dollars  a 
week,  4.85  per  cent  less  than  six  dollars,  and 
6.77  per  cent  less  than  seven  dollars.  That  is, 
about  20  per  cent  of  all  males  average  less  than 
one  dollar  per  day.  But  the  females  working 
at  this  low  scale  of  wages  comprise  72.94  per 
cent  of  all  the  workers.  In  the  higher  scale  of 
wages,  63.78  per  cent  of  all  the  males  receive 
a  dollar  and  a  half  or  more  per  day.  But  only 
a  little  more  than  10  per  cent  of  the  females 
employed  are  paid  wages  as  high.  Out  of 
7,257  receiving  twenty  dollars  a  week  and  over, 
only  268  are  women.  But  the  cruelest  part  of 
all  this  is  that  women,  standing  side  by  side 
with  men  in  the  same  shops  and  stores,  are  paid 
far  less  wages  for  the  same  work.  This  is  an 
aristocracy  of  sex  that  shames  and  belies  all  our 
claims  to  democracy. 

This  injustice    in    the  wages    of    women    is 
already    beginning    to    bear  a  fearful  fruitage. 


RELATION   OF   WAGES   TO  MORALS        123 

Miss  Alice  S.  Woodbridge,  the  secretary  of  the 
Working-women's  Society  of  New  York,  after  a 
recent  tour  of  investigation,  sums  up  the  result 
of  her  observations  in  the  following  words : 
"  The  wages  paid  to  women  average  between  four 
and  four  and  one-half  dollars  per  week,  and  are 
often  reduced  by  unreasonable  and  excessive 
fines.  The  little  cash-girls  do  not  average  two 
dollars  a  week.  In  one  large  house  the  aver- 
age wages  for  saleswomen  and  cash-girls  is 
two  dollars  and  forty  cents  a  week.  In  many 
fashionable  houses  the  saleswomen  are  not 
allowed  to  leave  the  counter  between  the  hours 
of  eleven  A.  M.  and  three  P.  M.,  except  for  lunch, 
and  if  a  saleswoman  has  a  customer  when  the 
lunch-hour  arrives,  she  is  obliged  to  remain  and 
wait  on  the  customer,  and  the  time  so  consumed 
is  deducted  from  lunch-time. 

"  If  mistakes  are  made,  they  are  charged  to 
the  saleswomen  and  cash-girls.  Generally,  the 
goods  are  placed  in  a  bin  and  slide  down  to 
the  floor  below.  If  a  check  is  lost,  the  goods 
are  charged  to  the  saleswoman,  though  it  may 
be  the  fault  of  the  shipping-clerk.  In  some 
stores  the  fines  are  divided  between  the  super- 


124  WHITE   SLAVES 

intendent  and  the  time-keeper.  In  one  store 
where  these  fines  amounted  to  three  thousand 
dollars,  the  superintendent  was  heard  to  re- 
proach the  time-keeper  with  not  being  strict 
enough.  Men's  wages  are  very  low,"  says 
Miss  Woodbridge,  "  but  it  seems  that  they  can 
not  fall  below  the  point  where  existence  is 
possible.  Women's  wages,  however,  have  no  low 
limit,  since  the  paths  of  shame  are  always  open 
to  them.  Cases  might  be  cited  where  frail,  deli- 
cate women,  unable  to  exist  on  the  salaries  they 
earn,  are  forced  to  crime  or  suicide.  The  story 
of  Mrs.  Henderson,  who  threw  herself  from  the 
attic  window  of  a  lodging-house  some  time 
ago,  is  the  story  of  many  another. 

"  There  have  been  many  such  instances  in  the 
last  two  weeks.  Mrs.  Henderson  could  not 
live  on  the  salaries  offered  her.  She  could  live 
if  she  accepted  the  c  propositions '  of  her  em- 
ployers. The  hope  of  an  easier  life,  the  fear  of 
death,  and  the  natural  clinging  to  life,  turn 
many  working-women  into  the  paths  of  shame." 
Miss  Woodbridge  further  adds  that  "  in  Paris 
it  is  an  understood  fact  that  women  who  are 
employed  in  shops  cannot  exist  without  assist- 


RELATION   OF   WAGES   TO   MORALS        125 

ance  from  other  questionable  sources,  and," 
she  continues,  "unless  something  is  done  at 
once,  this  must  also  become  the  case  in  our 
land,  where  we  pride  ourselves  on  our  respect 
for  honest  toil." 

Helen  Campbell,  in  her  "  Prisoners  of  Pov- 
erty," opens  a  little  window  into  the  terrible 
temptation  which  comes  to  generous  young 
souls  under  this  pressure  of  unrequited  toil. 
In  her  true  story  of  Rose  Haggerty,  who  was 
sewing  her  very  life  into  the  support  of  her 
orphan  brothers  and  sisters,  we  have  a  practical 
illustration  of  the  results  of  this  injustice. 
"  There  came  a  Saturday  night  when  she  took 
her  bundle  of  work,  —  shirts  again,  and  now 
eighty-five  cents  a  dozen  [it  is  worse  than  that 
under  some  of  our  Boston  sweaters]  ;  there  were 
five  dozen,  and  when  the  dollar  and  a  half  was 
laid  away  for  rent,  it  was  easy  to  see  what  was 
left  for  food,  coal,  and  light.  Clothing  had 
ceased  to  be  a  part  of  the  question.  The  chil- 
dren were  barefoot.  They  had  a  bit  of  meat  on 
Sunday ;  but  for  the  rest,  bread,  potatoes,  and 
tea  were  the  diet,  with  cabbage  and  a  bit  of 
pork,  now  and  then,  for  luxuries. 


126  WHITE   SLAVES 

"  Nora  (a  little  sick  sister)  had  been  failing, 
and  to-night  Rose  planned  to  buy  her  c  some- 
thing with  a  taste  to  it,'  and  looked  at  the  sau- 
sages hanging  in  long  links  with  a  sudden  reck- 
less determination  to  get  enough  for  all.  She 
was  faint  with  hunger,  and  staggered  as  she 
passed  a  basement  restaurant,  from  which  came 
savory  smells,  snuffed  longingly  by  some  half- 
starved  children.  Her  turn  was  long  in  coming ; 
and  as  she  laid  her  bundle  on  the  counter,  she 
saw  suddenly  that  her  needle  had  '  jumped,'  and 
that  half  an  inch  or  so  of  band  required  re- 
sewing.  As  she  looked,  the  foreman's  knife 
slipped  under  the  place,  and  in  a  moment  half 
the  band  had  been  ripped.  ''  That's  no  good,' 
he  said.  c  You  are  getting  botchier  all  the 
time.'  '  Give  it  to  me,'  Rose  pleaded.  ;  I'll 
do  it  over.'  4  Take  it  if  you  like,'  he  said 
indifferently,  c  but  there  is  no  pay  for  that 
kind  o'  work.'  He  had  counted  her  money  as 
he  spoke,  and  Rose  cried  out  as  she  saw  the 
sum :  4  Do  you  mean  you  will  cheat  me  of  the 
whole  dozen,  because  half  an  inch  on  one  has 
gone  wrong? '  '  Call  it  what  you  like,'  he  said. 
'  R.  &  Co.  ain't  going  to  send  out  anything  but 


RELATION   OF   WAGES   TO   MOKALS        127 

first-class  work.  Stand  out  of  the  way  and  let 
the  next  have  a  chance.  There's  your  three 
dollars  and  forty  cents.' 

"  Rose  went  out  silently,  choking  down  rash 
words  that  would  have  lost  her  work  altogether; 
but  as  she  left  the  dark  stairs,  and  felt  again 
the  cutting  wind  from  the  river,  she  stood  still, 
something  more  than  despair  on  her  face.  The 
children  could  hardly  fare  worse  without  her 
than  with  her.  The  river  could  not  be  colder 
than  this  cold  world  that  gave  her  no  chance, 
and  that  had  no  place  for  anything  but  rascals. 

"  She  turned  toward  it  as  the  thought  came  ; 
but  some  one  had  her  arm,  and  she  cried  out  sud- 
denly, and  tried  to  wrench  away.  4  Easy  now,' 
a  voice  said.  4  You're  breakin'  your  heart  for 
trouble,  an'  here  I  am  in  the  nick  o'  time. 
Come  with  me  an'  you'll  have  no  more  of  it, 
for  my  pocket's  full  to-night,  and  that's  more 
than  it'll  be  in  the  mornin'  if  you  do  n'  take  me 
in  tow.'  It  was  a  sailor  from  a  merchantman 
just  in,  and  Rose  looked  at  him  for  a  moment. 
Then  she  took  his  arm  and  walked  toward 
Roosevelt  Street.  It  might  be  dishonor,  but  it 
was  certainly  food  and  warmth  for  the  children, 


128 


WHITE   SLAVES 


and  what  did  it  matter?     She  had  fought  her 
fight  for  twenty  years,  and  it  had  been  a  vain 


A  BOSTON    "  BRIDGE   OF   SIGHS." 


struggle."     When  she  poured  her  heart-break- 
ing story  into  Helen  Campbell's  ears,  she  said, 


RELATION   OF   WAGES   TO   MORALS        129 

"  Let  God  Almighty  judge  who's  to  blame  most 
-  I  that  was  driven,  or  them  that  drove  me  to 
the  pass  I'm  in." 

Ah !  but  you  say,  even  as  you  sigh  over  this 
fearful  picture,  "  That  is  in  wicked  New  York." 
Yes,  but  Boston  has  its  tragedies  equally  as 
heartrending  and  shameful.  During  this  past 
week  a  thoroughly  respectable  young  married 
woman,  whose  evidence  is  indisputable,  and 
who,  prior  to  her  marriage,  had  worked  for 
several  years  as  a  saleswoman  in  the  Boston 
stores,  told  me  that  at  one  time  her  employer 
told  her  that,  on  account  of  the  dull  season, 
he  would  have  to  discharge  her,  but  that  he 
would  give  her  a  good  recommendation,  and  if 
she  would  take  it  to  another  prominent  dry- 
goods  house,  which  he  named,  he  thought  she 
would  at  once  secure  employment.  She  took 
the  letter  of  commendation,  and  went  as  di- 
rected. The  employing  agent  of  the  firm  to 
which  she  was  sent  asked  her  how  much  salary 
she  had  been  receiving,  and  she  answered,  "Five 
dollars  a  week."  He  replied,  "I  cannot  pay  you 
that  much,  I  can  only  give  you  three  dollars  a 
week ; "  to  which  she  answered,  "  I  can  hardly 


130  WHITE   SLAVES 

live  on  what  I  have  now,  and  I  could  not  possi- 
bly live  on  three  dollars  a  week."  He  replied, 
with  an  insulting  and  meaning  smile,  "  You 
would  have  to  depend  on  the  outside  friend  for 
that."  She  looked  him  in  the  eye,  and  said,  "  I 
want  to  earn  an  honest  living,  and  I  don't  want 
any  outside  friend,"  and  at  that  walked  away. 
She  told  her  employer  of  her  reception ;  and  he 
said  he  did  not  intend  to  discharge  her,  but  had 
heard  that  this  firm  was  in  the  habit  of  doing 
that  sort  of  thing,  and  was  determined  to  find 
out  if  it  were  true. 

I  received  a  letter  from  a  gentleman  in  Con- 
way,  N.  H.,  this  week,  who  writes,  not  knowing 
that  I  was  intending  to  discuss  this  ques- 
tion :  "  After  you  have  given  the  sweating- 
system  one  round,  can  you  not  take  up  the 
question  of  the  girls  working  in  the  big  stores  ? 
I  have  just  heard  a  well-authenticated  account 
of  a  man  high  in  authority  in  one  of  the  largest 
stores,  suggesting  the  way  to  ruin  to  a  young 
girl  from  the  country,  who  said,  when  she 
learned  what  her  wages  were  to  be,  that  they 
would  not  be  sufficient  to  give  her  a  bare  sup- 
port. This  not  only  shows  the  attitude  of  these 


RELATION   OF   WAGES   TO   MORALS        131 

wealthy  merchants  to  the  souls  of  their  work- 
ing-girls, but  it  shows  that  they  are  conscious 
of  their  attitude,  and  have  deliberately  chosen 
to  take  it."  I  am  told,  upon  undoubtedly 
credible  testimony,  that  another  young  woman 
who  came  to  Boston  from  the  country,  and 
sought  work  in  several  stores,  was  so  outraged 
at  the  vile  suggestions  which  were  made  to 
her  about  means  of  adding  to  her  salary,  that 
she  went  back  to  the  house  of  her  friend,  —  a 
lady  of  as  high  standing  as  any  in  the  city,  — 
and  cried  and  sobbed  all  night  long.  She  said 
she  would  beg  or  starve  before  she  would  sub- 
mit herself  to  such  outrage  again. 

It  is  impossible  to  turn  these  incidents  aside 
as  exaggerations.  They  are  horrible,  I  know ; 
but  the  most  horrible  thing  about  them  is,  that 
they  are  true.  You  will  say  perhaps,  as  some 
have  said  during  the  past  few  weeks  of  my 
exposure  of  the  sweat-shops,  "  What  good  will 
it  all  do,  this  harrowing  of  people's  minds  with 
these  cruel  stories  ?  " 

I  do  not  know  how  much  good  will  be  done. 
I  only  know  that  I  could  not  retain  my  self- 
respect  and  keep  silent. 


182  WHITE   SLAVES 

Nothing  is  more  foolish  than  for  us  to  keep 
still,  hoping  that  in  some  way  these  wrongs 
will  remedy  themselves.  Shall  we  look  to  the 
sweater,  the  chattel-mortgage  shark,  the  lecher- 
ous merchant,  to  reform  themselves?  They 
do  not  care  how  long,  nor  at  what  a  pittance, 
men  and  women  work,  or  to  what  fearful  ex- 
tremities they  are  driven.  Reforms  will  never 
come  from  the  gold-box  of  Mammon.  We 
must  cry  aloud  and  spare  not  until  these 
devilish  cruelties  and  unblushing  crimes  are 
impossible  in  our  fair  city. 

The  words  of  the  Christ,  as  interpreted  by 
James  Russell  Lowell,  are  ringing  in  my  ears :  — 

"  With  gates  of  silver  and  bars  of  gold, 
Ye  have  fenced  my  sheep  from  their  father's  fold. 
I  have  heard  the  dropping  of  their  tears 
In  heaven  these  eighteen  hundred  years." 

Then  if  we  reply  with  the  selfish  assurance  of 
some  of  these  pharisaical  political  economists 
who  are  criticising  me  to-day  :  — 

"  O  Lord  and  Master,  not  ours  the  guilt, 
We  huild  hut  as  our  fathers  built; 
Behold  Thine  images,  how  they  stand, 
Sovereign  and  sole,  through  all  the  land." 


RELATION   OF   WAGES   TO   MORALS        133 

How  his  answer  will  put  us  to  shame  and  con- 
fusion :  — 

"  Then  Christ  sought  out  an  artisan, 
A  low-browed,  stunted,  haggard  man, 
And  a  motherless  girl,  whose  fingers  thin, 
Pushed  from  her  faintly  want  and  sin. 

These  set  He  in  the  midst  of  them, 
And  as  they  drew  back  their  garment-hem, 
For  fear  of  defilement,  '  Lo  here,'  said  He, 
'  The  IMAGES  ye  have  made  of  Me! '  " 


VI 


THE   WAGES   AND   TEMPTATIONS   OF 
WORKING-PEOPLE 


"  Face  to  face  with  shame  and  insult 

Since  she  drew  her  bahy  breath, 
Were  it  strange  to  find  her  knocking 

At  the  cruel  door  of  death  ? 
Were  it  strange  if  she  should  parley 

With  the  great  arch  fiend  of  sin  ?" 

ALICE  CAKY:  The  Edge  of  Doom. 


VI 

THE  WAGES   AND  TEMPTATIONS   OF 
WORKING-PEOPLE 

I  HAVE  been  asked  to  give  a  reason  for  the 
faith  that  is  in  me  in  regard  to  certain  pain- 
ful charges  made  by  me  in  a  recent  sermon  on 
Wages  and  Morals  —  to  the  effect  that  the  per- 
sons high  in  authority  in  some  respectable 
Boston  stores  regard  favorably  immoral  rela- 
tions on  the  part  of  the  employes,  in  order  to 
make  it  possible  for  them  to  live  on  the  slender 
wages  paid  them. 

Without  repeating  here  any  of  the  cases  men- 
tioned in  my  sermon,  which  has  had  considerable 
publicity  through  the  daily  press,  permit  me  to 
quote  Mr.  Henry  Chase,  agent  of  the  Society  for 
the  Prevention  of  Crime.  He  says  that  in  con- 
versation with  a  leading  Boston  merchant,  the 
merchant  said  plainly  that  he  had  every  reason 
137 


138  WHITE    SLAVES 

to  believe  that  some  of  the  men  working  in  his 
store  paid  the  room-rent  and  a  trifling  sum  be- 
sides to  working-girls,  and  lived  with  them 
regularly.  Another  Boston  merchant  said  to 
Mr.  Ghase  that  he  regarded  that  kind  of  life 
on  the  part  of  his  clerks  favorably;  that  the 
wages  these  young  men  received  made  it  im- 
possible for  them  to  marry  and  support  a 
wife. 

I  am  informed  of  another  case,  upon  perfectly 
credible  authority,  of  two  young  women, 
strangers  in  the  city,  who  applied  to  a  leading 
store  for  a  situation  and  were  offered  work,  but 
when  informed  of  the  wages  they  were  to  re- 
ceive, exclaimed,  "How  could  we  live  on  such 
wages  as  that?"  The  employment  agent  of 
the  house  replied,  "  It  is  presumed  you  will 
have  a  gentleman  friend  to  assist  you."  The 
girls  looked  at  him  dumf ounded  for  a  moment ; 
and  when  his  meaning  dawned  upon  the  one 
who  had  acted  as  spokesman,  she  burst  into 
tears  and  they  hurried  from  the  store.  Only 
the  dread  of  bringing  unpleasant  notoriety  to 
these  thoroughly  respectable  young  women 
saved  this  scoundrel  from  a  horsewhipping 


WAGES    AND   TEMPTATIONS  139 

at   the    hands    of   their    indignant    male    rela- 
tives. 

A  leading  Boston  lady  of  wealth  and  social 
standing,  writing  to  thank  me  for  calling  public 
attention  to  the  subject,  says  that  she  herself 
knew  of  a  girl  who  was  told  to  " '  look  to  her 
gentleman  friends '  for  the  means  to  eke  out  a 
bare  livelihood  supplied  by  her  wages  in  a 
prominent  store  ;  "  and  adds  :  "  Such  things  are 
outrageous,  and  it  is  well  you  are  making  them 
known."  I  have  within  the  past  week  received 
another  letter  from  the  president  of  the  W.  C. 
T.  U.  in  one  of  the  Boston  wards,  a  lady  who 
has  had  more  than  twenty-five  years'  experience 
in  practical  reform  work  in  this  city.  She 
says  :  "  I  have  just  read  in  my  Congregationalist 
the  reference  to  your  sermon  of  last  Sunday  on 
the  officials  in  two  of  our  large  Boston  stores 
suggesting  immoral  means  of  eking  out  their 
scanty  wages  to  their  employes.  I  want  to 
thank  you  for  presenting  this  terrible  wicked- 
ness existing  among  us,  and  if  the  extent  could 
only  be  known,  every  white -ribbon  woman  in 
Boston  would  boycott  those  stores.  I  could 
call  names  of  splendid  young  women,  thrown 


140  WHITE   SLAVES 

on  their  own  resources,  applying  for  situations, 
who  were  cursed,  as  we  might  say,  with  a  good 
face  and  a  fine  figure,  fairly  insulted  with  offers 
made.  More  young  girls  have  been  ruined  in 
that  way  than  in  any  other.  In  sheer  despera- 
tion, not  even  earning  enough  to  pay  the  rent 
of  a  mean  attic  and  keep  hunger  away,  to  say 
nothing  of  clothing  and  other  things,  they  have, 
after  spending  the  last  cent,  and  not  having 
anything  to  take  them  home,  resorted  to  the 
last  means." 

This  is  a  terrible  letter  —  terribly  true.  I 
could  go  on,  column  after  column,  with  these 
details.  "  But,"  the  critic  says,  "  why  don't  you 
name  these  firms,  and  put  them  in  the  pillory  of 
public  contempt?"  I  can  tell  you  why  in  a 
few  words.  You  cannot  name  the  firms  with- 
out giving  the  name  of  the  young  woman  thus 
wickedly  approached ;  and  to  name  any  young 
woman  in  such  a  connection,  no  matter  how 
innocent  or  pure  she  is,  is  to  put  a  mark  upon 
her  as  long  as  she  lives. 

No  woman  is  willing  to  run  that  gantlet; 
and  so,  in  the  very  nature  of  the  case,  it  would 
rarely  happen  that  you  could  publicly  punish 


WAGES    AND   TEMPTATIONS  141 

the  guilty  party.  "  Well,  then,"  says  the  critic, 
"you  would  better  hold  your  peace."  Let  us 
consider  that  a  moment.  If  a  burglary  has 
been  committed  in  town,  do  you  keep  silent 
until  you  are  prepared  to  name  the  burglar  and 
publicly  indict  him  for  trial?  No,  indeed. 
You  tell  all  the  neighbors,  and  publish  in  all 
the  newspapers,  that  such  a  house  has  been  in- 
vaded, that  burglars  are  in  town.  What  is  the 
good  of  doing  this?  Why,  any  school-boy 
knows  that  it  is  a  blessing  to  every  other 
householder  in  the  town.  It  puts  people  on 
their  guard,  and  calls  special  attention  to  their 
bolts  and  locks.  If  there  is  any  good  reason 
why  we  should  not  follow  the  same  common- 
sense  course  in  this  matter  under  consideration, 
I  do  not  know  what  it  is. 

I  do  not  bring  a  broad,  sweeping  accusation 
against  either  class  of  persons  especially  con- 
cerned in  this  article.  I  am  no  defarner  of  my 
kind.  I  believe  that  the  majority  of  Boston 
merchants  are  honest,  pure-minded  men.  I 
believe  that  the  majority  of  Boston  working- 
women.,  old  or  young,  are  as  pure  and  noble  as 
any  women  in  the  world.  Nevertheless,  I  have 


142  WHITE   SLAVES 

stated  in  this  article  undeniable  facts  —  facts 
which  I  can  substantiate  to  the  satisfaction  of 
any  honest  man  or  woman  who,  still  doubting, 
cares  to  see  me  personally  about  the  matter. 
These  facts  are  serious  enough  to  give  us  all 
reason  for  solemn  and  earnest  reflection. 


VII 
BOSTON'S    UNCLE   TOM'S   CABIN 


"  That  each  should  in  his  house  abide, 
Therefore  was  the  world  so  wide." 

RALPH  WALDO  EMERSON  :  Fragments 
of  Nature  and  Life. 


VII 

BOSTON'S   UNCLE    TOM'S   CABIN 

WHEN,  over  one-half  of  our  land,  there 
hung  the  black  pall  of  African  slavery, 
no  other  one  thing,  perhaps,  did  more  to  reveal 
the  terrible  cruelty  of  the  system,  and  to  arouse 
the  indignation  of  the  civilized  world,  than 
Harriet  Beecher  Stowe's  "Uncle  Tom's  Cabin." 
In  June,  1882,  when  the  elite  of  American 
literature  gathered  at  Boston '  to  celebrate  her 
seventieth  birthday,  Dr.  Oliver  Wendell 
Holmes  read  a  poem  in  which  Mrs.  Stowe's 
share  in  the  emancipation  of  the  colored  race 
was  recorded  with  equal  wit  and  pathos :  — 

"  When  Archimedes  so  long  ago 
Spoke  out  so  grandly,  '  Dos  pou  sto  — 

Give  me  a  place  to  stand  on ; 
I'll  move  your  planet  for  you  now,' 
He  little  dreamed  or  fancied  how 
The  sto  at  last  should  find  its  pou 
For  woman's  faith  to  land  on. 
145 


146  WHITE   SLAVES 

Her  lever  was  the  wand  of  art, 
Her  fulcrum  was  the  human  heart, 

Whence  all  unfailing  aid  is; 
She  moved  the  earth,  its  thunders  pealed, 
Its  mountains  shook,  its  temples  reeled, 
The  blood-red  fountains  were  unsealed, 

And  Moloch  sunk  to  Hades." 

Mrs.  Stowe,  in  the  preface  of  her  son's  biog- 
raphy of  herself,  aptly  quotes  the  words  of  Mr. 
Valiant-for-Truth  in  the  "  Pilgrim's  Progress  :  " 
"  My  sword  I  give  to  him  that  shall  succeed 
me  in  my  pilgrimage,  and  my  courage  and  skill 
to  him  that  can  get  it."  May  God  grant  us 
courage  and  skill  to  use  the  memory  of  "  Uncle 
Tom's  Cabin  "  to  serve  the  "  white  slaves  "  of 
our  own  time  and  city  ! 

To  begin  by  quoting  from  Mrs.  Stowe's 
famous  story :  "  The  cabin  of  Uncle  Tom  was  a 
small  log  building  close  adjoining  to  'the 
house,'  as  the  negro  par  excellence  designates 
his  master's  dwelling.  In  front  it  had  a  neat 
garden-patch  where  every  summer  strawberries, 
raspberries,  and  a  variety  of  fruits  and  vege- 
tables flourished  under  careful  training."  This 
little  log  house  was  a  small  and  crowded  dwell- 
ing-place for  Uncle  Tom  and  his  wife  and 


BOSTON'S  UNCLE  TOM'S  CABIN         147 

little  ones,  yet  it  had  several  things  in  its  favor. 
In  the  first  place  it  had  plenty  of  sunshine  and 
pure  air.  It  was  an  individual  cabin,  occupied 
by  Uncle  Tom's  family  alone.  The  climate 
was  sunshiny ;  and  when  Uncle  Tom's  wife, 
Aunt  Chloe,  wanted  to  wash,  she  could  build  a 
fire  out  in  the  open  air,  and  spread  her  clothing 
on  the  fragrant  raspberry-bushes,  while  her 
woolly-headed  little  flock  were  sent  scamper- 
ing over  the  pastures  and  fields. 

Now  let  us  look  at  the  Boston  cabins.  In  the 
first  place,  there  are  no  individual  cabins  for  the 
poor.  The  price  of  land  makes  that  impossible. 
A  big  Boston  tenement  house  means  from  four 
to  ten  cabins  on  a  floor,  and  from  three  to  six 
floors  under  one  roof.  In  a  great  many  of  these 
sunlight  is  an  impossibility.  Boston  is  peculiarly 
cursed  with  the  rear  tenement.  All  through 
the  North  End  and  some  parts  of  the  West  End 
and  "  the  Cove,"  there  abound  dark  courts,  often- 
times reached  only  by  a  tunnel,  that  are  almost 
entirely  barren  of  the  sunlight.  For  instance, 
there  is  a  court  off  North  Street,  reached  by  a  tun- 
nel such  as  I  have  described,  where  the  tene- 
ment houses  are  three  deep  from  the  street. 


148 


WHITE   SLAVES 


The  inside  tenement,  facing  on  the  court,  through 
most  of  the  year  is  densely  packed  with  people. 


COUET  OFF   NORTH   STilEET. 


For  a  large  part  of  the  length  of  the  court  it  is 
only  four  feet  wide,  and  the   front  windows  of 


BOSTON'S  UNCLE  TOM'S  CABIN         149 

the  house,  which  is  three  stories  in  height,  look 
out  011  the  dark  wall  which  is  only  four  feet 
away.  On  a  dark  day  there  is  scarcely  any  light 
at  all  in  these  rooms ;  and  on  the  brightest  sun- 
shiny day  there  is  only  a  little  light  during  the 
middle  of  the  day,  and  never  any  direct  rays  of 
the  sun.  I  found,  up  in  one  of  these  rooms,  a 
young  woman  with  her  first-born  in  her  arms, 
—  a  pale,  sickly  little  child,  not  yet  a  year  old, 
that  will  certainly  die  before  the  summer  is  out, 
if  it  stays  there.  This  poor  young  mother  was 
born  in  Maine,  and  followed  her  husband  down 
here  from  the  green  fields  and  the  breath  of  the 
pines.  The  husband  works  out  of  the  city  dur- 
ing the  day,  coming  home  late  in  the  evening 
and  going  out  in  the  morning  ;  but  all  day  long 
the  mother  and  wife  is  kept  here  with  her 
invalid  child.  Their  faces  look  like  potato- 
vines  that  have  sprouted  and  grown  in  the 
cellar.  They  are  dying  for  the  lack  of  sun- 
shine and  pure  air. 

Modern  science  is  imperative  in  its  urgent 
emphasis  on  the  influence  of  light  and  sunshine 
on  health ;  and  we  are  told  that  children  brought 
up  even  in  close  valleys  do  not  thrive  so  well  as 


150  WHITE   SLAVES 

those  raised  on  the  hillsides  or  the  tablelands, 
and  that  families  through  the  generations  grow 
smaller  in  stature,  and  less  vigorous  in  physical 
and  mental  force,  if  much  excluded  from  light 
and  sunshine.  He  was  a  wise  old  father  who 
lived  out  on  the  plains,  and  came  to  visit  his 
son,  who  had  moved  into  a  deep  mountain  gorge. 
At  family  prayers  he  thanked  the  Lord  that  his 
son  was  still  well,  although  he  lived  where  the 
sun  rose  at  nine  o'clock  in  the  morning  and  set 
at  four  in  the  afternoon.  But  there  are  scores 
of  Boston  tenement  houses  where  the  sun  never 
rises  at  all,  except  on  the  roof-tops,  or  now  and 
then  sends  a  slant  ray,  thrown  down  into  the 
dark  court  in  seeming  mockery.  It  is  impossi- 
ble for  any  one  to  get  from  language  alone,  either 
spoken  or  written,  an  adequate  idea  of  the  lone- 
liness, the  sense  of  gloom,  the  filth  and  squalor, 
of  the  apartments  in  some  of  these  Boston  tene- 
ment houses.  It  requires  a  strong  stomach,  and 
a  still  stronger  determination  that  nothing  shall 
thwart  you  from  knowing  how  your  brothers  and 
sisters  live,  to  take  you  the  second  time  into  such 
a  place.  Go  with  me  into  one  that  is  not  ten 
minutes'  walk  from  the  mansions  of  wealth  and 


BOSTON'S  UNCLE  TOM'S  CABIN         153 

luxury  on  Beacon  Hill.  We  go  back  through  a 
narrow  passage,  where  you  can  touch  the  walls 
on  either  side  of  you,  and  then  down  some 
steps  into  a  dark  underground  court.  Now  you 
have  to  bend  over  almost  double  till  you  feel 
your  way  to  a  door  on  your  left,  and  knock. 
In  answer  to  the  "  Come,"  you  open  the  door 
and  go  in,  and  are  barely  able  to  stand  upright 
inside  the  room.  We  are  in  a  cellar  about  ten 
feet  square,  and  this  is  separated  from  others 
like  it  by  a  partition.  We  are  really  in  one  room 
of  a  big  cellar  stretching  under  a  crowded  tene- 
ment house  over  our  heads.  We  look  around  us ; 
and  as  soon  as  our  eyes  get  accustomed  to  the 
darkness  —  for  the  only  light  is  from  the  narrow 
width  of  glass,  reaching  from  the  ground  up  to 
the  floor  which  forms  the  ceiling  of  the  room 
where  we  stand  —  we  see  that  this  is  the  den  — 
for  you  cannot  call  it  anything  else  —  of  an 
old  man  and  his  wife.  They  have  both  passed 
threescore.  Their  locks  are  white,  and  they  are 
no  longer. able  to  work  as  hard  as  formerly. 

They  have  had  children,  but  they  are  dead. 
The  two  old  people,  waifs  from  bonny  Scotland, 
have  probably  made  their  last  move,  until  the 


154  WHITE   SLAVES 

city  sends  around  its  rough  box  and  dead-cart  to 
take  them  to  their  last  sleep  in  the  Potter's 
Field.  They  used  to  live  up-stairs  ;  but  as  they 
grew  older,  and  were  not  so  spry  as  formerly, 
they  could  no  longer  pay  the  rent,  and  therefore 
moved  down  till  at  last  they  are  at  the  bottom. 
For  this  den  of  misery,  in  which  a  well-to-do 
Western  farmer  would  not  think  of  keeping  his 
hog,  they  pay  one  dollar  per  week.  They  have 
to  cook,  eat,  sleep,  and  do  everything  else 
pertaining  to  domestic  life,  in  this  one  dark, 
filthy  hole.  The  combination  of  smells  is  inde- 
scribable. But  as  you  begin  to  sicken  and  are 
ready  to  flee,  you  remember,  with  a  shock,  that 
what  sickens  you  so  in  five  minutes  this  old 
white-headed  man  and  his  wife  have  to  endure 
day  after  day,  and  night  after  night,  and  on  — 
and  on  —  there  is  no  hope  of  anything  better 
this  side  of  a  pauper's  grave.  Don't  blame 
these  old  people  for  not  keeping  their  den 
clean.  Nobody  could  keep  it  clean.  There  is  no 
sunshine,  and  only  a  little  while  in  the  day  any 
light  at  all.  It  is  necessarily  damp  and  mouldy. 
We  talk  with  the  old  man.  He  goes  fishing 
and  does  such  odd  jobs  as  he  is  able.  He  says 


BOSTON'S  UNCLE  TOM'S  CABIN         157 

one  of  the  worst  things  with  which  they  have 
to  contend  is  the  rats ;  and  then  he  points  out 
places  in  the  wall,  down  next  to  the  ground, 
that  he  has  filled  with  little  billets  of  wood, 
stuck  in  every-which-way,  in  his  efforts  to  keep 
the  rats  from  preying  on  them  at  night.  Let 
us  foot  up  the  column. 

Old  age,  with  its  accompanying  weakness 
and  loss  of  hopefulness  and  courage  ;  darkness, 
with  the  brooding  sense  of  gloom  and  melan- 
choly that  goes  with  it ;  noisome  smells,  that 
make  even  a  breath  of  the  narrow,  crowded 
street  seem  like  a  draught  from  Paradise ;  filth, 
mould,  and  rats  that  compete  with  you  for  what 
really  has  been  taken  from  their  appropriate 
domain,  —  and  yet  remember  that  down  there, 
in  all  that,  and  more,  for  no  tongue  or  pen  can 
tell  its  wretchedness,  live  hundreds  of  your 
brothers  and  sisters.  Not  the  drunken  and  the 
dissolute  only,  for  about  this  place  which  I 
have  described,  or  its  tenants,  there  was  not  the 
slightest  suggestion  of  liquor  anywhere. 

Down  on  North  Street  is  an  old  house  which, 
the  traditions  tell  us,  was  originally  built  for  a 
"  wayside  inn,9'  in  the  good  old  days  before  the 


158  WHITE   SLAVES 

word  hotel  was  so  well  known  as  now.  It  is 
not  a  very  large  house,  as  tenement  houses  go, 
yet  the  missionary  who  is  with  me  assures  me 
that  he  has  found  as  many  as  thirty  families 
stowed  away  under  its  roof.  A  wall  is  built  up 
around  the  rear  and  on  one  side,  corralling  a 
little  breathing-space  or  side  yard.  A  stable 
for  two  horses  comes  out  of  this  space ;  and  the 
stench  from  these  stalls  mingles  with  the 
stench  of  the  water-closets  which  are  all  situ- 
ated in  this  yard,  and  the  united  fumes  rise  to 
every  rear  window  of  the  establishment. 

The  stairways  are  rickety  and  filthy.  We  go 
,in  at  two  places  to  sample  the  tenantry.  In  the 
first  we  find  an  old  Irish  woman  who  lives  here 
with  her  two  boys.  She  keeps  house  for  them 
in  two  little  rooms.  Everything  is  poverty- 
stricken  and  dirty.  The  poor  old  woman  is  a 
wreck  in  body  and  in  mind.  She  has  buried 
seven  daughters.  She  says,  "  I've  buried  a  good 
flock.  Too  much  trouble  broke  my  very  life 
out  of  me."  We  go  in  at  another  door.  Here 
is  an  English  woman  ;  she  has  two  children  and 
keeps  a  boarder.  She  scrubs  now  in  a  bank 
building,  and  washes  at  other  places.  She 


BOSTON'S  UNCLE  TOM'S  CABIN         159 

sewed  for  a  long  time.  At  first  she  was  paid 
fourteen  cents  a  pair  for  finishing  pants,  then 
thirteen  cents,  then  twelve  cents,  and  finally 
ten  cents,  and  then,  as  it  was  impossible  to  get 
bread  for  her  children  on  what  she  could  earn, 
she  went  to  scrubbing.  Being  a  very  rugged 
woman  physically,  she  is  able  to  do  this.  If 
she  had  been  frail  and  delicate,  with  a  young 
babe,  she  would  have  been  compelled  to  keep 
on  finishing  pants  at  ten  cents  a  pair. 

It  is  hot  and  dirty  here  everywhere.  How 
could  it  be  otherwise?  Every  one  of  these 
housekeepers  must  have  a  fire  in  her  room 
every  time  she  wants  hot  water  for  washing  or 
any  other  purpose.  Take  the  day  of  my  visit, 
—  one  of  the  hottest  in  June ;  it  is  ninety  de- 
grees in  the  shade,  but  with  the  fire  in  the 
rickety  stove  in  the  room  in  which  this  mother 
and  her  little  girl  are  working,  it  cannot  be  less 
than  a  hundred  and  thirty.  But  the  fire  can- 
not go  out,  or  the  washing  will  stop,  and  there 
will  be  no  food  to-morrow.  For  these  two  mis- 
erable sweat-boxes  —  the  paper  half  torn  off, 
bed-bug  dens  that  nothing  could  thoroughly 
cleanse  except  a  fire  that  would  exterminate 


160 


WHITE   SLAVES 


the  very  walls  —  she  pays  two  dollars  and  a 
half  per  week.  As  a  striking  illustration  of 
the  good  results  of  agitation  on  these  subjects, 
I  called  at  this  house  during  the  past  week, 


AN   ARCtKHT   TENEMENT. 


when  one  of  the  tenants  told  me  that  my  re- 
peated visits  to  the  place,  and  the  fact  that  I 
had  had  a  photographer  there  making  views  of 
it,  had  awakened  so  much  comment  in  the  sec- 
tion that  the  landlord  had  got  frightened  and 


BOSTON'S  UNCLE  TOM'S  CABIN         161 

had  had  the  corridors  washed,  and  had  put  new 
paper  on  some  of  the  rooms. 

Off  Norman  Street  in  the  West  End  is  a 
court  which  I  have  visited  during  the  past 
week  in  company  with  two  other  gentlemen. 
The  houses  on  this  court  are  occupied  by  Ital- 
ian fruit-venders  for  the  most  part. 

The  court  itself  is  littered  up  with  refuse 
and  decayed  fruit  in  a  most  filthy  and  un- 
healthy manner.  In  one  of  these  large  tene- 
ment houses  there  is  no  family  which  occupies 
more  than  one  room.  Let  us  investigate  a  few 
of  them.  Here  is  a  room  fifteen  feet  long.  At 
its  narrow  end  it  is  only  five  feet  six  inches 
wide,  and  at  the  other  end  not  quite  seven  feet 
wide.  In  this  narrow  lane  five  people  live. 
Huge  strings  of  bananas  in  every  stage  of 
ripening  hang  over  the  piles  of  filthy  bedding. 
It  is  in  the  second  story,  and  the  corridor  in 
front,  which  is  forty -three  inches  wide  —  unus- 
ually spacious,  as  you  will  see  later  —  is  half 
taken  up  with  boxes  of  decaying  fruit,  buckets 
of  slops,  and  piles  of  refuse.  The  walls  are  as 
black  and  rusty  as  the  stove. 

Here    is    another   family    residence    in    this 


162  WHITE   SLAVES 

building.  The  size  is  ten  and  one-half  by  ten 
and  one-fourth  feet.  Four  people  live  here. 
The  entire  furnishings  are  not  worth  five  dol- 
lars. The  cupboard  is  a  lemon-box  with  a  par- 
tition in  it,  set  on  the  floor.  The  bread, 
kneaded  and  ready  to  bake,  is  laid  out  on  an 
old,  dirty,  colored  handkerchief  on  the  pile  of 
bedding ;  there  are  no  chairs,  table,  or  other  fur- 
niture of  any  kind.  Another  room  which  also 
answers  for  home  for  four  people,  is  sixteen 
feet  long  and  six  feet  five  inches  wide.  The 
walls  here,  as  in  many  other  rooms,  have  large 
sections  of  the  plastering  torn  off,  and  are 
blackened  with  many  years  of  smoke  and  dirt. 
The  next  family  we  visit  has  three  people. 
The  room  is  seven  by  nine  feet.  The  bed 
covers  all  except  thirty-one  inches  on  one  end, 
and  twenty-four  inches  on  one  side.  There  are 
boxes  of  fruit  under  the  bed,  some  of  it  decay- 
ing; what  is  too  rotten  to  sell  must  serve  for 
home  consumption.  And  so  we  go  on,  room 
after  room,  arid  floor  after  floor.  Now,  section 
fourteen  of  the  law  in  regard  to  tenement 
houses  says  :  "  The  tenant  of  any  lodging-house 
or  tenement  house  shall  thoroughly  cleanse  all 


BOSTON  S    UNCLE   TOM  S    CABIN 


163 


the  rooms,  floors,  windows,  and  doors  of  the 
house,  or  part  of  the  house,  of  which  he  is  the 
tenant,  to  the  satisfaction  of  the  Board  of 
Health  ;  and  the  owner  or  lessee  shall  well  and 


ITALIAN   FRUIT-VENDERS   AT   HOME. 

sufficiently,  to  the  satisfaction  of  said  board, 
whitewash  and  otherwise  cleanse  the  walls  and 
ceilings  thereof,  once  at  least  in  every  year,  in 
the  months  of  April  or  May,  and  have  the 
privies,  drains,  and  cesspools  kept  in  good 


164  WHITE   SLAVES 

order,  and  the  passages  and  stairs  kept  clean 
and  in  good  condition." 

Now,  I  have  no  desire  or  intention  to  do 
any  injustice  to  the  members  of  the  Board  of 
Health.  They  may  be  over-worked,  and  have  an 
insufficient  force  to  pay  proper  attention  to  their 
duties ;  but  I  state  only  the  simple  fact  —  and 
I  am  sure  it  is  a  fact  that  the  people  generally 
ought  to  know  —  when  I  say  that  there  is  a 
shameful  and  dangerous  lack  of  such  attention 
in  many  of  these  tenement  houses.  In  regard 
to  the  houses  I  have  just  described  the  law  is  a 
dead  letter.  The  passages  and  stairs  are  filthy 
beyond  description.  Some  of  these  corridors 
are  only  twenty,  twenty-three,  and  twenty-nine 
inches  wide,  and  yet,  dark  and  narrow  as  they 
are,  they  are  largely  filled  up  with  piles  of 
refuse  and  garbage.  In  one  of  these  buildings 
the  water-closet  on  the  landing  has  had  the 
door  taken  down  and  put  away,  so  that  it 
stands  open  day  and  night. 

On  some  of  the  walls  of  these  living  rooms 
the  cockroaches  and  bed-bugs  swarm  in  abun- 
dance, literally  by  hundreds,  at  ten  o'clock  in 
the  morning.  The  walls  and  ceilings  have  not 


BOSTON'S  UNCLE  TOM'S  CABIN          165 

only  not  been  cleansed  or  whitened  this  year, 
but  it  must  have  been  many  years  since  there 
has  been  an  attempt  made  to  clean  them.  In 
one  of  these  bedrooms  I  counted  twenty-five 


COCKROACHES   BY    FLASH-LIGHT. 

boxes  of  lemons,  besides  great  bunches  of  half- 
ripened  bananas.  Live  chickens  were  kept 
under  the  bed  in  one  of  these  rooms.  The 
fruit  which  is  ripened  in  these  places  is  sold 
daily  in  every  section  of  the  city,  and  people 


166 


WHITE    SLAVES 


who  live  with  healthful  surroundings,  far  away 
from  this  pestilent  hole,  are  risking  the  health 
of  themselves  and  their  children,  unwittingly, 
by  purchasing  fruit  that  cannot  help  but  have 
absorbed  something  of  the  poison  from  the 


BANANA  SELLER. 


atmosphere  of  these  filthy,  crowded  quarters. 
The  Board  of  Health  know  about  this  place, 
for  their  sign  is  put  up  over  the  doors  of  these 
rooms,  telling  how  many  are  allowed  to  sleep  in 
each  room ;  but  they  might  as  well  have  kept 


BOSTON'S  UNCLE  TOM'S  CABIN         167 

the  sign  in  the  office  for  all  the  good  it  has 
done,  for  in  nearly  every  room  the  inmates  ad- 
mitted to  the  Italian  interpreter  who  accom- 
panied me,  that  from  two  to  three  times  as 
many  persons  occupied  the  room  as  the  sign 
permits.  One  of  these  buildings,  four  stories 
high,  is  so  old  and  rickety  that  it  cannot  stand 
alone,  and  has  careened  over  against  the  build- 
ing next  to  it.  Everything  is  of  wood,  and  if 
it  was  once  on  fire,  with  its  narrow,  obstructed 
halls  and  stairways,  the  swarm  of  tenants  would 
burn  like  rats  in  a  trap. 

This  is  by  no  means  an  isolated  case.  When 
Rev.  Mr.  Barnett,  of  Whitechapel,  London,  was 
here  a  few  days  ago,  one  of  the  inspectors  of 
the  Board  of  Health  took  him  to  visit  some  of 
the  tenement  houses  of  South  Boston  and  the 
North  End.  A  Boston  Herald  reporter  went 
with  them,  and  I  quote  from  his  report  of  the 
trip :  "  The  party  first  visited  the  tenement 
houses  of  South  Boston,  occupied  for  the  most 
part  by  the  fishermen  and  their  families,  and 
the  poorer  classes  of  the  Irish  population.  The 
first  one  visited  was  the  house  known  as  the 
Slate  block  on  First  Street.  Here  was  seen  one 


168  WHITE   SLAVES 

of  the  best  examples  of  the  worst  class  of  dwell- 
ings, and  one  in  which  legislation  had  accom- 
plished but  little.  Here  was  a  building  where 
the  law  had  not  been  complied  with  regard- 
ing whitewashing,  and  the  walls  were  dirty 
and  stained  with  smoke.  Hardly  a  house  was 
seen,  in  the  whole  course  of  the  journey, 
where  this  simple  law  in  the  interest  of  health 
arid  sanitary  condition  of  living  had  been  ob- 
served. In  many  cases,  it  appeared  as  though 
it  had  not  only  been  neglected  this  spring, 
but  for  many  springs  in  the  past.  In  driving 
from  this  section  of  the  city  to  the  North  End, 
Mr.  Barnett  made  the  somewhat  startling  re- 
mark, c  We  have  nothing  nearly  so  bad  as  this 
in  Whitechapel.'  " 

Doesn't  it  seem  a  little  strange  to  an  outsider 
that  the  Board  of  Health  keep  on  hand,  as  it 
were,  block  after  block  of  tenement  houses, 
where  both  landlords  and  tenants  deliberately 
set  the  law  at  defiance,  which  they  can  show  off 
at  call  ?  There  could  not  be  a  greater  folly 
than  to  put  this  question  aside  as  a  matter  only 
interesting  to  those  poor  people  themselves. 
The  slavery  of  Uncle  Tom  and  his  woolly- 


BOSTON'S  UNCLE  TOM'S  CABIN         171 

headed  children  cursed  the  plantation  house,  in 
the  end,  as  much  as  it  did  the  cabin.  We 
must  look  after  these  people  and  help  them  for 
the  sake  of  others,  if  not  on  their  own  account. 
Dr.  John  S.  Billings,  in  an  address  before  the 
American  Academy  of  Political  and  Social 
Science  in  February  of  this  year,  says  :  "  When 
diphtheria  prevails  in  a  tenement  house,  many 
school  children  are  endangered,  and  the  most 
perfect  plumbing  in  a  house  affords  little  pro- 
tection against  the  entrance  of  this  disease,  if 
it  is  prevailing  in  the  vicinity.  Typhus  and 
smallpox  do  not  confine  their  ravages  to  the 
vicious  and  foul,  after  they  have  acquired 
malignancy  amongst  them.  Mingled  with 
those  who  might  not  be  worth  saving,  is  a 
much  larger  number  of  honest,  industrious, 
and  fairly  intelligent  and  energetic  poor 
people  who  live  by  days'  wages,  and  are  strug- 
gling against  their  surroundings  to  improve 
their  condition,  and  especially  to  give  their 
children  a  fairer  chance  in  the  race  for  life  than 
they  themselves  have  had.  These  last  are  the 
people  whom  it  is  worth  while  to  help  for  their 
own  sake.  You  will  observe,"  says  this  cool- 


172  WHITE    SLAVES 

headed  doctor,  "  that  I  am  considering  this  mat- 
ter entirely  from  the  money  point  of  view, 
without  reference  to  religion  or  morals  or  altru- 
ism. The  question,  '  Am  I  my  brother's 
keeper?  '  is  far  more  important,  I  admit ;  but  I 
confine  myself  to  a  lower  plane  —  to  the  bread- 
and-butter  aspects  of  municipal  life.  Great 
numbers  of  the  incompetent,  vicious,  idle,  de- 
formed, or  starved-brain  class  have  been  poured 
into  this  country  by  immigration  during  the 
last  fifty  years,  and  have  filled  our  slums  and 
tenement  houses,  our  hospitals,  asylums,  alms- 
houses,  and  jails  to  overflowing.  They  cannot 
escape  the  results  of  their  physical  organiza- 
tion, which,  in  its  turn,  is  an  inherited  result  of 
ancestral  degeneration.  For  them  we  may 
'hope  the  best,  but  hold  the  present,  fatal 
daughter  of  the  past/  Their  death  rates  are 
from  two  to  three  times  as  great  as  those  of 
the  better  class  of  population ;  one-fourth  of 
their  sickness  is  treated  by  charities,  and  one- 
third  of  those  who  die  among  them  are  buried 
at  public  expense.  The  districts  in  which  they 
live  require  a  larger  proportion  of  the  work  of 
city  officials,  inspections,  removal  of  nuisances, 


BOSTON'S  UNCLE  TOM'S  CABIN         173 

police,  the  courts,  etc. ;  and,  on  the  other 
hand,  they  contribute  but  little  to  municipal 
or  other  taxation.  All  this  is  well  known ; 
but  we  have  not  yet  arrived  at  the  stage  of 
applying  efficient  and  systematic  prevention, 
which  is  perfectly  possible,  and  are  still  potter- 
ing with  the  so-called  remedies  which  are  of 
little  use.  In  these  districts  the  deaths  usu- 
ally outnumber  the  births,  so  that  if  it  were 
not  for  a  continued  stream  of  new  recruits  this 
population  would  diminish.  How  can  acces- 
sions be  prevented  ?  One  way  is  to  get  rid  of 
and  prevent  additions  to  the  kind  of  dwellings 
these  people  seek.  Do  you  say  that  they  must 
live  somewhere,  and  that  there  must  be  such 
places  for  such  people  ?  I  do  not  think  so.  It 
is  not  necessary  that  any  city  should  allow  the 
existence  of  any  such  houses  within  its  limits ; 
and  if  their  destruction  forces  some  persons 
into  the  almshouses,  and  drives  others  away,  it 
will  be  the  cheapest  and  best  in  the  end." 

There  are  scores,  and  I  think  I  should  be  safe 
to  say  hundreds,  of  tenement  houses  within  the 
city  limits  of  Boston  which  are  unfit  to  be 
inhabited,  and  where  the  landlords  do  not 


174  WHITE   SLA VE3 

pretend  to  obey  the  laws  of  health  required  by 
the  statutes,  and  yet  the  tenants  are  paying  a 
sufficiently  large  rent  to  pay  good  interest 
on  a  clean,  healthful  tenement.  Our  modern 
science  and  our  Christian  civilization  are  alike 
challenged  by  this  condition  of  things. 

Yet,  as  you  think  of  the  horror  of  these 
Boston  "  cabins "  and  their  miserable  tenants, 
you  will  say,  "  They  are  at  least  free,  they 
cannot  be  bought  and  sold  like  Uncle  Tom." 
Alas !  they  are  not  free.  True,  no  one  can 
take  them  to  an  auction-block,  but  their  bond- 
age is  none  the  less  real.  Into  that  fearfully 
neglected  Italian  tenement  house  which  I  have 
tried  to  describe  in  this  discourse,  the  sweater 
had  come,  and  women  were  making  a  fine  class 
of  knee  pants  for  twenty  cents  a  dozen  pairs, 
which  means  forty  cents  a  day  in  wages.  These 
people  find  it  impossible  to  save.  The  low^er 
strata  of  wages  in  Boston,  and  in  all  our  large 
cities,  has  reached  the  point  where  the  people 
who  depend  on  them  labor  simply  to  exist. 
One  day's  sickness  in  father  or  mother  or  child 
leaves  a  gap  it  takes  weeks  or  months  to  bridge 
over  again. 


BOSTON  S    UNCLE   TOM  8    CABIN 


175 


Sometimes  a  Southern  Uncle  Tom  or  Aunt 
Chloe  had  their  son  or  daughter  sold  out  of 
their  arms,  leaving  them  with  broken  hearts. 
But  the  white  slaves  of  the  tenement  house 


TWO   O'CLOCK   IN    THE   MOKNING. 

sound  every  deep  of  human  agony.  Think 
what  it  is  to  try  to  raise  boys  honest,  when  their 
playmates  are  thieves  from  the  cradle  !  Think 
of  the  agony  of  a  mother  fighting  the  wolf 
of  starvation  day  and  night  and  finding,  as, 
one  Boston  mother  did  only  a  few  weeks  ago, 


176  WHITE    SLAVES 

that  the  wolf  of  lust  had  devoured  her  one  ewe 
lamb  before  she  was  yet  thirteen  years  of  age ! 
Brothers,  it  is  not  yet  time  for  the  "  abolition- 
ist "  to  put  aside  his  tocsin  or  his  sword  while 
so  many  of  our  brothers  and  sisters  are  living 
and  sighing  in  their  despair :  — 

"  Where  home  is  a  hovel,  and  dull  we  grovel, 

Forgetting  that  the  world  is  fair; 
Where  no  babe  we  cherish  lest  its  soul  perish, 
Where  our  mirth  is  crime,  our  love  a  snare." 


VITI 

SOCIAL  MICROBES  IN   BOSTON   TENE^ 

MENT    HOUSES,  AND    HOW    TO 

DESTROY  THEM 


"  Ring  in  the  valiant  man  and  free, 

The  larger  heart,  the  kindlier  hand ; 
Ring  out  the  darkness  of  the  land, 
Ring  in  the  Christ  that  is  to  be." 

ALFKED  TENNYSON  :  In  Memoriam. 


VIII 

SOCIAL    MICROBES    IN   BOSTON   TENE- 
MENT  HOUSES,   AND   HOW    TO 
DESTEOY   THEM 

THE  greatest  claim  Job  ever  makes  for  him- 
self is  that  in  the  days  of  his  prosperity, 
when  everybody  knew  him  and  was  obsequious 
to  him  as  a  rich  man,  he  was  not  only  kind 
to  the  poor,  but  exhibited  for  them  a  genuine 
sympathy  which  was  illustrated  in  his  carefully 
searching  out  the  causes  of  their  troubles. 

There  is  a  good  deal  that  passes  for  kind- 
ness and  sympathy,  in  these  days,  that  is 
nothing  more  than  lazy  good-nature.  Ignorant 
or  indifferent  charity  is  often  as  mischievous  in 
its  results  as  the  wicked  greed  of  the  skinflint 
and  the  miser.  Sympathy,  to  be  worth  any 
thing,  must  be  incarnated,  as  in  Job's  case,  so 
that  it  becomes  feet  to  the  lame  and  eyes  to 
the  blind.  Frances  Power  Cobbe  declares  that 
the  most  Christ-like  thing  she  ever  heard  from 
179 


180  WHITE   SLAVES 

human   lips,   was    from   the    "  Good    Earl "  of 
Shaftesbury :  — 

"The  friend  of  all  the  friendless  'neath  the  sun; 

Whose  hand  had  wiped  away  a  thousand  tears  ; 
Whose  eloquent  lips  and  clear,  strong  brain  have  done 
God's  holy  service  through  his  fourscore  years." 

When  he  was  speaking  to  her  one  day,  in  his 
study,  of  the  wrongs  of  young  girls,  which  he 
had  just  been  investigating,  the  tears  came  to 
his  eyes  and  his  voice  trembled.  After  a  pause, 
he  added,  "  When  I  feel  how  old  I  am,  and 
know  I  must  soon  die,  I  hope  it  is  not  wrong, 
but  I  feel  I  cannot  bear  to  go  and  leave  the 
world  with  all  the  misery  in  it." 

People  who  have  no  genuine  sympathy  for 
their  fellows,  oftentimes  grow  harder-hearted 
at  a  revelation  of  the  miseries  of  the  oppressed, 
which  stirs  nobler  souls  to  their  profoundest 
depths  and  awakens  them  to  all  manner  of 
helpful  benevolence.  There  is  an  old  legend  of 
St.  Hilary  Loricatus,  who  scourged  himself  so 
perpetually  that  his  skin  became  like  the  hide  of 
a  rhinoceros.  So,  acquaintance  with  the  sorrows 
and  woes  of  the  poor  and  unfortunate,  acquired 
out  of  a  morbid  curiosity,  or  a  hunger  for  that 


SOCIAL  MICROBES  181 

kind  of  emotion  experienced  by  the  reader  of 
sensational  novels,  will  result  only  in  marring 
and  hardening  us. 

Very  different  is  the  result  of  such  knowledge 
when  obtained  through  an  earnest  sympathy 
and  a  holy  ambition  to  assuage  the  sorrows  of 
the  distressed.  Shelley  never  wrote  anything 
more  beautiful,  perhaps,  than  this :  — 

"  In  sacred  Athens,  near  the  fane 
Of  Wisdom,  Pity's  altar  stood; 
Serve  not  the  unknown  God  in  vain, 
But  pay  that  broken  shrine  again, 
Love  for  hate,  and  tears  for  blood." 

I  put  this  emphasis  on  the  need  of  searching 
out  the  wrongs  of  the  poor,  because  I  am  satis- 
fied that  one  of  the  greatest  factors  in  the  pres- 
ent tenement-house  situation  is  the  ignorance 
and  indifference  of  the  people  as  to  the  condi- 
tion of  things  in  the  slum  tenement  house.  I 
am  sure  that  nothing  but  good  can  come  from 
an  honest  attempt  to  u  let  in  the  light  of  day 
upon  the  landlordism  of  the  slums,  as  you  have 
let  it  in  upon  Mormonism,  and  other  hateful 
things  that  prefer  darkness  rather  than  light." 

We  need  to  bear  in  mind  constantly,  in  con- 


182  WHITE    SLAVES 

sidering  this  question,  that  society  is  a  wholly, 
and  that  an  evil  in  one  class  of  our  citizenship 
cannot  help  but  have  its  vicious  influence,  in  a 
greater  or  less  degree,  upon  every  other  portion] 
of  society.  We  must  also  remember  that  the 
bad  tenement  house  is  the  birthplace  and  cradle, 
and  to  a  large  extent  the  schoolroom,  of  mul- 
titudes of  boys  and  girls  who  are  to  exert  their 
influence  on  every  phase  of  our  city  life  in 
the  near  future.  Modern  scientists  have  pur- 
sued the  study  of  disease  microbes  with  such 
diligence,  that  they  claim  to  be  able  to  recognize 
beyond  mistake  the  germs  of  certain  diseases. 
They  find  them  in  the  atmosphere  almost  every- 
where, and  they  prove  that  these  microbes  are 
real  germs  of  disease,  by  their  experiments  with 
the  lower  animals. 

The  soil  under  our  feet  is  full  of  these  micro- 
organisms. The  smallest  quantity  of  earth  put 
in  water  reveals,  through  the  microscope,  be- 
sides the  organic  and  mineral  matter,  a  mass  of 
beings  more  or  less  complex,  moving  more  or 
less  rapidly.  A  German  author,  Mr.  Reimers, 
has  calculated  that  every  cubic  centimetre  of 
earth  may  contain  several  million  germs. 


raj 


EXTEHIOIi   OF   A  NOKTH   END  TENEMENT  HOUSE. 


SOCIAL   MICROBES  185 

Among  these  microbes  some  have  not  been 
studied,  and  the  part  they  play  in  the  economy  of 
life  is  not  known  to  us,  while  certain  others  have 
functions  which  have  been  well  determined. 
Carbuncle,  for  instance,  is  one  of  the  most  terri- 
ble maladies  which  can  attack  cattle,  and  some- 
times even  men.  Now-a-days,  thanks  to  the 
labors  of  the  scientists,  this  malady  had  become 
quite  rare,  and  tends  more  and  more  to  disap- 
pear. For  a  long  time  it  has  been  known  that 
carbuncle  has  been  due  to  a  particular  microbe, 
but  it  was  not  known  how  it  was  propagated. 
M.  Pasteur  has  demonstrated  that  this  propaga- 
tion was  due,  in  part  at  least,  to  the  longevity 
of  the  germs. 

Thus  it  is,  if  you  bury  the  dead  body  of 
an  animal  which  has  died  of  carbuncle,  in  a 
ditch  five  or  six  feet  deep,  and  cover  it  with 
earth,  the  carbuncle  bacteria  will  be  found  in 
the  neighboring  soil  several  years  after  the 
interment.  We  can  understand,  then,  that 
cattle  put  to  graze  on  this  land,  or  fed  by  prov- 
ender from  it,  may  contract  the  disease.  So 
when  the  cause  of  this  malady  was  unknown, 
it  is  not  to  be  wondered  at  that  superstitious 


186  WHITE   SLAVES 

country    people    called     these    places    "  cursed 
fields." 

There  are  social  microbes  no  less  potent  and 
mischievous  than  those  with  which  Pasteur 
deals.  Some  of  those  who  are  infected  with 
the  contagion  are  put  away  in  pest-houses  or 
in  prisons  ;  many  more  walk  the  streets,  and 
spread  their  dangerous  infection  through  the 
social,  business,  and  home  life  of  the  people. 
My  claim  is  that  the  bad  tenement  house  in 
Boston,  as  everywhere  else  where  people  are 
herded  together  in  crowded  filthy  quarters, 
where  sanitary  laws  are  neglected  or  defied 
either  by  landlords  or  tenants,  or  both,  fur- 
nishes a  breeding -place  for  the  microbes  of 
nearly  every  sin  and  vice  that  infest  our  modern 
society.  The  editor  of  the  Portland  Oregonian, 
commenting  on  General  Booth's  scheme  for  the 
rescue  of  the  London  poor,  says:  "Its  most 
hopeful  features  are  those  which  propose  to 
provide  the  lowly  with  means  to  help  them- 
selves, in  the  building  and  maintenance  of 
homes.  Thousands  of  women  belonging  to 
the  <•  submerged  tenth '  need  almost  as  much 
instruction  in  the  simple  acts  of  housewifely 


SOCIAL   MICROBES  189 

thrift  and  neatness,  as  the  squaws  belonging 
to  the  North  American  Indian  tribes. 

"  Homes,  in  the  civilized  sense  of  the  term, 
they  have  never  had  to  keep,  and  their  squalid 
abiding -places,  overrun  with  wretched  and 
quarrelsome  half-clad  children,  and  bare  of  the 
commonest  comforts  of  life,  have  offered  very 
unattractive  fields  for  womanly  originality  and 
painstaking  endeavor.  A  cheerful,  quiet  home, 
wherein  the  laborer  is  always  sure  of  warmth 
and  light  and  wholesome  food,  has  in  it  a 
saving  grace  which  all  the  creeds  in  Chris- 
tendom cannot  compass  without  its  auxiliary 
aid." 

The  power  of  the  liquor  traffic,  and  all  the 
other  kindred  vices  that  cluster  about  it,  is 
constantly  re-enforced  by  the  social  conditions 
of  the  neglected  tenement  house.  Temptation 
enters  as  largely  into  drunkenness  as  into  any 
other  vice ;  and  in  the  foul  and  fetid  courts  of 
the  North  End,  the  West  End,  South  Boston, 
and  the  Cove,  temptation  to  vice  of  every  kind  is 
ever  present.  The  words  of  George  R.  Simms, 
in  his  earnest  study  of  life  in  the  homes  of  the 
London  poor,  apply  with  equal  force  to  such 


190  WHITE   SLAVES 

sections  in  Boston :  ^  The  complete  lack  of 
home  comforts,  the  necessity  of  dulling  every 
finer  sense  in  order  to  endure  the  surrounding 
horrors,  the  absence  of  anything  to  enter  into 
competition  with  the  light  and  glitter  of  the 
gin  palace,  and  the  cheapness  of  drink  in  com- 
parison with  food,  all  these  contribute  to  make 
the  poor  easy  victims  to  intemperance.  Among 
the  poor,  the  constant  war  with  fate,  the  harassing 
conditions  of  daily  life,  and  the  apparent  hope- 
lessness of  trying  to  improve  their  condition,  do 
undoubtedly  tend  to  make  them  c  drown  their 
sorrows,'  and  rush  for  relief  to  the  fiery  waters 
of  that  Lethe  which  the  publican  dispenses  at 
so  much  a  glass.  Ask  any  of  the  temperance 
workers  in  the  viler  districts,  and  they  will  tell 
you  how  they  have  watched  hundreds  of  decent 
folk  come  into  a  bad  neighborhood,  and  gradually 
sink  under  the  degrading  influences  of  their 
surroundings.  There  are  few  men  who  have 
worked  to  keep  their  brethren  from  the  clutches 
of  the  drink  fiend  who  would  not  gladly  hail 
the  advent  of  air,  and  light,  and  cleanliness,  and 
the  enforcement  of  sanitary  laws,  as  the  best 
weapons  with  which  to  do  doughty  deeds  in 


SOCIAL   MICROBES  191 

their  combats  with  intemperance  among  the 
poor." 

One  of  the  hardest  things  to  deal  with,  in  an 
attempt  to  arouse  good  people  who  are  well-to- 
do  and  steadily  prosperous  to  a  serious  study 
of  the  troubles  of  the  poor,  is  to  shake  them 
out  of  the  erroneous  conviction  that  it  is  always 
the  fault  of  the  poor  that  they  are  in  financial 
straits  and  compelled  to  resort  to  such  places 
of  dwelling.  Put  yourself  in  your  brother's 
place,  and  listen  to  this  true  story  of  New 
England  life  enacted  during  the  past  year. 

There  lived,  until  a  little  over  a  year  ago,  in 
Western  New  York,  a  family  which  we  will  call 
Simmons,  —  far  removed  from  the  real  name. 
The  family  consisted  of  the  husband  and  wife, 
each  about  thirty-five  years  of  age,  and  four 
children,  —  the  eldest  ten.  Mr.  Simmons  was 
a  confectioner  by  trade,  but  for  some  years 
had  been  travelling  for  a  wholesale  grocer's 
house  in  New  York.  He  was  a  man  of  good 
address,  and  was  fairly  successful  until,  in  some 
of  the  competitions  of  trade,  the  New  York 
house  determined  to  withdraw  from  that  sec- 
tion, and  he  was  thrown  out  of  business.  After 


192  WHITE    SLAVES 

casting  about  for  several  weeks  in  a  vain 
attempt  to  get  employment,  he  decided  to  bring 
his  family  with  him  to  New  England.  They 
removed  to  Worcester,  where  for  months  he 
sought  employment,  but  was  unable  to  find 
anything  except  short  jobs  for  a  day  or  two  at  a 
time.  Mrs.  Simmons,  who  was  an  educated 
and  refined  woman,  and  a  most  worthy  lady  in 
every  respect,  did  what  she  could  to  assist  her 
husband ;  but  as  a  fifth  child  was  born  to  them 
in  the  autumn,  she  was  so  weakened  by  sick- 
ness and  the  care  of  her  children,  that  she 
could  do  little  besides  looking  after  them.  As 
the  months  passed,  they  were  compelled  to 
resort  to  the  pawnshop  —  the  bank  of  the  un- 
fortunate. First  went  their  silverware,  which 
was  mostly  wedding  presents,  an  anguish  to 
part  with  to  people  of  their  history  and  charac- 
ter. Then  followed  their  best  clothing,  and 
some  splendid  books  out  of  a  well-selected 
library  —  for  remember  that  these  were  edu- 
cated, intelligent  people,  with  all  the  instincts 
and  tastes  of  good  breeding.  Finally,  dis- 
couraged with  Worcester,  they  removed,  with 
what  they  had  left,  to  Boston.  Again  for 


SOCIAL   MICROBES  198 

weary  days,  stretching  into  weeks,  went  on 
the  disheartening  search  for  work.  Mr.  Sim- 
mons says  in  those  days  the  very  iron  entered 
into  his  soul.  To  see  his  refined,  cultivated 
wife  sick  and  wasting  away,  his  children  im- 


THE   BANK   OF   THE   UNFORTUNATE. 

properly  clothed  and  hungry,  and  compelled, 
day  by  day,  to  return  to  the  tenement  house 
on  the  filthy  street  whither  his  condition  had 
forced  him,  with  a  feeling  of  utter  helpless- 
ness, he  declares  that  nothing  but  the  religious 
convictions  of  his  youth,  and  the  sense  of  the 


194  WHITE   SLAVES 

cowardice  of  the  act,  saved  him  from  the  death 
of  the  suicide. 

During  the  winter  they  were  compelled  to 
sell  their  excellent  cooking-range,  which  they 
had  brought  with  them  from  New  York,  and 
procure  a  cheaper  one.  All  the  books  that 
were  left  followed  ;  then  the  bedsteads  and 
other  furniture  went,  until  there  was  only  one 
bedstead  left,  and  that  was  rented  through  the 
day  to  a  man  who  worked  nights.  Many  days 
they  had  nothing  to  eat  but  bread  or  crackers 
—  and  often  that  was  of  a  stale  quality  and  a 
scant  allowance.  The  eldest,  a  little  boy, 
attended  the  Sunday-school  of  a  Boston  church ; 
he  has  one  of  the  truest,  noblest,  and  most 
interesting  faces  I  have  ever  seen.  On  missing 
him  for  a  couple  of  Sundays,  the  superintend- 
ent of  the  school  went  in  search  of  him,  and 
for  the  first  time  knew  of  the  condition  of  the 
family. 

The  Sunday-school  superintendent  found  his 
little  scholar  lying  in  a  dry-goods  box,  —  for 
there  was  no  bed  in  the  daytime,  —  sick  from 
lack  of  food  and  clothing.  He  made  inquiries 
of  the  mother,  and  at  last,  with  sobs  and  tears, 


SOCIAL  MICROBES  197 

she  told  their  story.  Their  necessities  were  re- 
lieved, and  through  the  sympathetic  interest  of 
a  number  of  Christian  men  the  husband  now 
has  steady  employment.  Now,  it  is  easy  to  say 
that  he  should  have  gone  to  the  church,  or  the 
charities,  with  the  story  of  his  condition  —  and 
I  think  that  is  true;  but,  on  the  other  hand, 
you  can  see  that  it  was  the  very  worthiness  of 
the  family,  their  very  nobility,  that  made  that 
course  seem  more  bitter  than  starvation.  Bear 
in  mind  that  these  people  were  not  dissipated, 
that  they  were  strictly  moral  and  religious,  and 
that  both  father  and  mother  were  of  prepossess- 
ing appearance.  This  man  did  not  drink,  or 
smoke,  or  chew,  and  was  intensely  anxious  to 
take  care  of  his  family ;  he  was  willing  to  do 
the  humblest  work,  and  preferred  death  to  beg- 
ging or  dishonor. 

Only  a  few  weeks  since,  I  called,  with  a 
brother  minister,  on  a  family  of  Maine  people 
in  a  miserable  tenement  house  in  the  North 
End.  The  husband  and  father  had  been  sick 
and  out  of  work  for  a  good  while.  A  short 
time  before  my  visit,  however,  he  had  shipped 
on  a  coaster  from  Hyannis  to  Philadelphia.  He 


198  WHITE   SLAVES 

had  arranged  for  a  little  credit  for  his  family  to 
keep  them  from  starving,  until  his  expected 
return ;  but  the  winds  had  been  contrary,  and 
he  was  several  days  overdue.  The  wife  and 
four  children  were  in  despair.  They  had  had 
nothing  since  the  morning  of  the  day  before, 
and  then  only  bread  and  water,  except  a  little 
broth  which  a  neighbor,  not  much  better  off, 
brought  in  to  one  of  the  children  —  a  beautiful 
little  girl,  sick  with  what  would  be  "la  grippe  " 
on  Beacon  Hill,  but  is  only  "grip"  down  in 
the  slums.  The  mother  had  a  little  babe,  and 
was  in  such  delicate  health  that  it  was  impossi- 
ble for  her  to  go  out  to  wash  or  scrub.  Her 
two  narrow  little  rooms  were  scrupulously  neat 
and  clean,  as  were  her  children;  but  the  tears 
ran  down  her  cheeks  as,  in  answer  to  our  ques- 
tions, she  confessed,  as  if  she  had  been  admit- 
ting a  crime,  poor  soul,  that  they  had  had 
nothing  to  eat  all  day. 

I  give  you  these  instances  to  show  you  how 
false  is  the  idea  that  poverty  arid  enforced 
residence  in  a  miserable  tenement  house  are  a 
badge  of  sin  or  wrong-doing.  But  think  of 
the  agony  of  fathers  and  mothers,  who  love 


SOCIAL  MICROBES 


199 


their  children  as  well  as  you  love  yours,  and 
have  ambitions  for  them  as  holy  and  pure,  who 
are  compelled  to  see  their  loved  ones  deteriorat- 
ing under  their  eyes,  and  through  the  contam- 


A   CHEAP   LODGING-HOUSE. 


ination  of  the  poisonous  moral  atmosphere 
which  they  breathe,  dropping  slowly,  but  cer- 
tainly, down  to  a  level  with  the  brutality  which 
surrounds  them. 

Well,  you  ask,  what  is  the  remedy  for  all 


200  WHITE   SLAVES 

this  ?  My  main  purpose,  in  this  series  of  dis- 
courses, was  to  place  the  facts  of  the  situation 
before  the  people.  But  I  have  some  plain, 
practical,  common-sense  suggestions  to  make. 
In  the  firstjjlace,  we  want  an  almost  infinitely 
better  system  of  inspection  of  tenement  houses. 
Every  tenement  house  in  the  city,  having  as 
many  as  eight  families  in  it,  ought  to  be  in- 
spected carefully,  at  least  once  a  month  —  and 
once  a  week  would  be  better  —  by  an  officer 
who  holds  his  place  under  civil-service  rules, 
entirely  independent  of  politics,  and  who  is 
held  to  a  strict  responsibility  for  the  perform- 
ance of  his  duties. 

As  to  the  tenement-house  sweat-shop,  I  am 
convinced  that  a  very  simple  law,  which  oughtx 
to  be  passed  by  the  next  legislature,  requiring  \ 
every  manufacturer,  of  any  kind,  to  file  with 
the  inspector  of  factories  a  list  of  the  names 
and  addresses  of  the  people  who  work  for  him, 
would  work  wonders.  It  may  be  that  there  are 
some  firms  as  low  down  as  the  one  whose  super- 
intendent remarked  the  other  day,  when  asked 
what  the  effect  would  be  in  their  business  if  it 
were  known  that  their  goods  were  manufac- 


SOCIAL   MICROBES  201 

tared  in  filthy  tenement  houses :  "  It  would 
make  no  difference  at  all;  our  customers  would 
buy  of  us  just  the  same,  no  matter  where  our 
garments  were  made."  This  firm,  I  am  sure, 
would  find  itself  mistaken,  and,  with  a  great 
many  others,  would  break  off  its  connection 
with  the  sweating-business  if  the  law  forced  it 
to  make  that  relation  public. 

Yet  I  am  sure  that  nothing  promises  so  much 
for  reform  as  a  revival  of  conscientious  land- 
lordism. The  landlord  is  now,  too  often,  as 
one  well  says,  "  an  enormous  wealthy  estate, 
with  heirs  scattered  here  and  there,  who  hire 
an  agent,  as  their  Southern  brothers  hired  an 
overseer,  irresponsible,  unsympathetic,  caring 
only  to  please  his  patrons,  by  showing  a  large 
balance  of  profit.  And  the  poorer  the  tene- 
ment, the  larger  the  balance.  No  repairs,  no 
janitor,  no  supervision  to  pay  for ;  accommoda- 
tions so  wretched  that  only  the  very  wretched, 
who  will  expect  to  be  crowded  and  miserable, 
will  apply  for  it.  O  landlord  !  or  '  estate ! ' 
too  busy  to  collect  your  own  rents,  be  not  too 
indolent  to  require  of  your  agent  a  strict 
account  when  he  brings  you  twenty  per  cent 


202  WHITE    SLAVES 

instead  of  six  !  You  would  quickly  bring  him 
to  book  if  he  were  suddenly  to  hand  you  six 
instead  of  twenty,  but  the  time,  to  question 
him  is  when  it  is  twenty." 

Mrs.  Alice  Wellington  Rollins  says  in  the 
Forum,  speaking  of  New  York:  "Nothing  is 
more  astonishing,  in  investigating  the  slums, 
than  the  discovery  of  the  enormous  prices  the 
poor  are  paying  for  the  most  wretched  accommo- 
dations. One  man  boasts  that  he  draws  thirty- 
three  per  cent  on  his  tenement  investments." 
The  same  writer  wisely  says,  farther:  "The 
landlord  is  not  to  be  a  philanthropist,  willing  to 
sacrifice  himself  for  the  good  of  others ;  he  is 
to  be  an  intelligent  capitalist,  putting  in  his 
money  purely  as  an  investment,  and  philan- 
thropic only  to  the  degree  of  being  satisfied 
with  six  per  cent  returns,  of  hiring  a  janitor  to 
be  on  hand  day  and  night,  of  being  his  own 
agent,  or  keeping  a  sharp  lookout  on  the  one  he 
may  have  to  employ,  and  of  urging  his  wife  to 
collect  the  rents.  But  individual  landlordism 
need  not  necessarily  be  confined  to  individual 
persons.  Individual  corporations  can  become 
landlords.  Why  should  not  some  of  the  insur/- 


SOCIAL   MICROBES  203 

ance  companies  that  complain  of  being  unable 
to  find  suitable  investments  for  their  immense 
funds,  take  hold  of  the  tenement  question  ?  A 
life-insurance  company  of  Boston,  complaining 
of  the  low  rates  of  interest  obtainable,  announce 
that  they  never  expect  over  five  per  cent,  and 
find  it  difficult  at  times  to  get  four. 

"  Half  of  the  trouble  is  caused  by  the  wilf  nl 
cruelty,  but  half  by  the  thoughtlessness,  of  the 
landlords.  A  wise  writer  has  said  recently : 
;  Often  you  don't  need  to  say  to  a  man,  "  Why 
do  you  do  so  ?  "  If  you  can  show  him  what  he 
is  doing,  it  is  often  enough  to  rouse  him  to 
reform.'  I  have  faith  enough  in  human  nature 
to  believe  that  if  we  could  organize  a  proces- 
sion of  landlords  and  compel  them  to  walk 
through  the  tenement  districts,  they  would  be- 
gin the  reform  themselves." 

Let  me  relate  to  you  a  very  interesting 
experiment  that  has  indeed  long  since  passed 
the  era  of  experiment.  In  1879  Mrs.  Alice 
N.  Lincoln  and  a  young  lady  friend  were  so 
wrought  upon  by  the  filth  and  misery  which 
they  saw  in  certain  tenement  houses  visited  by 
them,  in  connection  with  the  Associated  Chari- 


204  WHITE  SLAVES 

ties,  that  they  determined  to  do  something  to 
better  the  condition  of  these  poor  people.  They 
hired  a  large  house  on  the  corner  of  Chardon 
and  Merrimac  Streets.  It  contained  twenty- 
seven  tenements,  and  the  rent  agreed  upon 
with  the  owner  was  one  thousand  dollars  a 
year,  though  since  the  first  year  they  have  paid 
twelve  hundred.  The  house  had  the  worst 
possible  reputation  morally,  and  had  been  under 
the  ban  of  the  police  for  a  long  time. 

It  was,  at  the  time  they  took  it,  half  empty, 
because  of  the  degraded  character  of  the  occu- 
pants. Its  entries  and  corridors  were  blackened 
with  smoke,  and  dingy  and  uninviting.  The 
sinks  were  in  dark  corners,  and  were  foul  and 
disease-breeding.  The  stairways  were  innocent 
of  water  or  broom,  and  throughout  the  entire 
house,  from  top  to  bottom,  ceilings,  walls,  stair- 
ways—  everything  was  dirty  and  neglected.  It 
was  surely  not  an  attractive  task  to  attempt  to 
bring  cleanliness  and  order  out  of  such  chaos, 
but  these  resolute  young  reformers  deliberately 
set  themselves  to  perform  the  seemingly  im- 
possible. The  interior  was  painted,  improved 
means  of  lighting  and  ventilating  the  sinks  were 


SOCIAL    MICROBES  205 

ordered,  and  wood  and  coal  closets  arranged  for 
each  tenement  on  its  own  landing. 

Previously  the  tenants  had  to  keep  their 
fuel  in  the  cellar.  The  mouldy  wall-paper  was 
removed  from  the  entries,  and  a  fresh  surface 
of  plastering  was  put  on.  A  few  of  the  worst 
tenants  had  to  be  removed,  but  the  majority, 
pleased  with  the  new  administration  of  things, 
were  willing  to  accept  its  rules  and  remain. 
Tenants  were  soon  found  for  every  room ;  and 
this  house,  which  had  been  regarded  as  very  un- 
healthy, and  had  been  a  regular  hive  for  fevers 
under  the  old  regime  of  carelessness  and  greed, 
that  did  not  care  how  dirty  the  tenants  were 
so  long  as  they  paid  their  rent,  under  the  new 
rule  of  cleanliness  became  so  healthy  that  dis- 
ease was  almost  unknown,  and  was,  and  is  to 
this  day,  known  by  the  tenants  and  the  neigh- 
borhood generally  as  the  "  Good  Luck  House." 
The  ladies  collected  their  own  rents,  and  kept 
everything  well  under  their  own  supervision. 
A  close  account  was  kept  of  all  receipts  and 
expenditures,  and  at  the  end  of  the  first  year  the 
balance  of  cash  in  hand  was  $111.67,  or  more  than 
eleven  per  cent  on  the  investment.  The  second 


206 


WHITE   SLAVES 


year  it  was  still  more  profitable,  the  net  sum  at 
the  end  of  the  year  being  $157.47.  Mrs.  Lin- 
coln still  carries  on  the  administration  of  the 
"  Good  Luck  House,"  and  no  queen  was  ever 


THE    "GOOD   LUCK"    TENEMENT    HOUSE. 


treated  with  more  genuine  respect  than  she  is 
there.  She  is  regarded  as  a  most  practical  sort 
of  patron  saint  to  the  institution.  Yet  there  is 
no  element  of  charity  suggested  in  her  dealings 
with  her  tenants.  It  is  simply  Christian  jus- 
tice. She  seeks  with  great  care  to  help  them 


SOCIAL   MICROBES  207 

retain  their  self-respect,  and  treats  them  as 
fully  her  equal  in  personal  responsibility.  The 
rent  is  required  to  be  paid  regularly.  One 
rigid  rule  enforced  upon  all  tenants  is  cleanli- 
ness. She  pays  for  the  weekly  scrubbing  of 
the  halls  and  stairways,  but  the  tenants  are 
required  to  sweep  them  every  day,  in  turn. 
The  sinks  and  drains  are  kept  clean.  All  this 
has  a  marvellous  effect  on  the  home  habits  of 
the  inmates ;  and  I  have  seen  as  clean  and  tidy 
rooms  in  the  "  Good  Luck  "  tenement  house  as 
I  have  seen  anywhere,  and  that,  too,  on  days 
when  they  were  caught  unawares,  it  not  being 
the  regular  rent  day,  when  they  expect  the 
landlady.  All  above  six  per  cent  has  been  put 
in  the  bank  as  an  emergency  fund,  and,  from 
time  to  time,  the  tenants  have  been  permitted 
to  share  some  unexpected  pleasure  from  this. 
Once  a  splendid  entertainment  was  given  the 
tenants,  in  a  public  hall,  with  stereopticon 
views ;  at  another  time,  it  took  a  more  material 
method  of  expression,  and  a  good  blanket,  a 
pitcher  and  basin  for  each  family,  came  out  of 
this  fund.  In  every  way  the  tenants  are  made 
to  know  that  their  interests  are  in  perfect  har- 


208  WHITE   SLAVES 

mony  with  those  of  the  landlady.  To  encour- 
age them  to  use  more  room,  where  they  are 
able  to  pay  for  it,  a  discount  is  made  on  each 
additional  room  taken,  and  ten  cents  a  week  is 
deducted  for  payment  in  advance.  A  majority 
of  them  avail  themselves  of  this  privilege. 

If  he  who  makes  a  tree  to  grow  where  none 
grew  before,  is  a  public  benefactor,  surely  she 
who  has  made  it  possible  for  many  family-trees 
to  grow  and  thrive,  yielding  their  fragrance 
and  their  fruit  in  a  pure  home  and  social  life, 
is  a  benefactress  in  the  highest  sense. 

Let  us  encourage  on  every  side  the  trans- 
formation of  filthy,  neglected  tenements  into 
"  Good  Luck  "  houses. 

A  little  wise  thoughtfulness  may  vastly  im- 
prove the  childhood  of  the  slums.  Boys'  clubs 
and  girls'  clubs  are  steps  in  the  right  direction. 
They  awaken  an  interest  in  innocent  games, 
afford  a  glimpse  of  beautiful  pictures,  and  give 
zest  to  the  intellectual  appetite  for  fresh,  whole- 
some books.  The  "  sand  garden "  is  also  a 
happy  thought.  Think  of  thousands  of  chil- 
dren reared  in  the  narrowest,  filthiest  quarters, 
who  have  never  had  a  chance  to  make  even  a 


SOCIAL   MICROBES 


209 


mud-pie  out  in  the  pure  air  of  heaven.  It  may 
seem  a  small  thing  to  some,  but  it  is  a  tragedy 
to  me.  When  I  remember  my  own  happy 
childhood  over  in  the  Oregon  woods,  where  I 


THE   SAND   GARDEN. 


ran  as  free  and  untrammelled  as  a  young  colt 
in  the  pasture,  and  made  mud-pies  beside  the 
brook  that  had  its  home  in  a  great  bubbling 
spring  on  the  hillside,  breathing  the  air  fragrant 
with  the  perfume  of  wild  lilies,  while  robins 
and  bobolinks  and  meadow  larks  sported  and 


210  WHITE   SLAVES 

sang  without  fear,  on  every  side  —  when  I  con- 
trast a  childhood  like  that  with  the  child-life 
in  the  Boston  slums,  I  am  heart-broken.  There 
is  nothing  so  sad  as  this  "  murder  of  the  inno- 
cents "  that  is  going  on  in  all  our  great  cities. 
Marianne  Farningham  sings  their  dirge :  — 

"Such  sights  there  are  in  the  great  sin-soiled  city, 
As  might  compel  an  angel  into  pity; 
But  none  more  sad  in  all  the  world  of  care, 
Than  a  young  child  driven  to  black  despair!" 

Surely,  trumpet  blast  never  called  men  and 
women  to  a  holier  crusade  than  this  rescue  of 
the  lost  childhood  of  the  slums. 


IX 


OLD   WORLD   TIDES   IN   BOSTON 


"  There  is  a  poor  blind  Samson  in  this  land, 

Shorn  of  his  strength  and  bound  in  bonds  of  steel, 
Who  may,  in  some  grim  revel,  raise  his  hand, 
And  shake  the  pillars  of  this  Commonweal, 
Till  the  vast  temple  of  our  liberties 
A  shapeless  mass  of  wreck  and  rubbish  lies." 

HENRY  WADSWORTH  LONGFELLOW:  The  Warning. 


IX 
OLD  WORLD  TIDES  IN  BOSTON 

TRAVELLERS  tell  us  that  in  some  parts  of 
JL  the  ocean,  when  the  waves  are  still  and  the 
water  is  perfectly  quiet,  the  curious  eye  may 
look  down  through  the  clear  depths  and  see, 
rising  out  of  the  ocean's  bed,  the  gnarled  and 
broken  trunks  of  forest  trees.  Once  this  ocean- 
bed  was  above  the  water-line,  and  these  trees 
grew  in  the  sunshine  and  stretched  their 
branches  upward  to  the  blue  sky  of  heaven. 
But,  as  the  result  of  some  strange  convulsion 
of  the  earth,  the  coast-line  has  sunk  down  and 
down,  until  the  incoming  tide  of  the  salt  sea  has 
swept  over  it,  and  schools  of  porpoises  and  fishes 
swim  among  the  branches  of  old  forest  trees 
that  in  the  former  time  were  accustomed  to  the 
chatter  of  squirrels  and  songs  of  birds. 

Any  one  studying  the  older  and  more  historic 
sections  of  Boston  will  see  many  relics  of  a  past 
213 


214  WHITE   SLAVES 

civilization  by  which  he  will  be  impressed  in 
very  much  the  same  way  as  is  the  sailor  who 
looks  on  the  remains  of  an  ancient  forest  in  the 
ocean's  bed.  Standing  in  the  North  End,  in 
front  of  the  "  Copp's  Hill  Burying-ground,"  and 
looking  up  at  the  tower  of  Christ  Church  where 
the  famous  signal  lanterns  were  hung,  one  can 
almost  hear  the  old  church  appropriating  the 
words  of  the  poet :  — 

"  By  time's  highway —  a  milestone  gray  — 

I  watch  the  world  march  by; 
An  endless  stream  of  moving  men 

Rolls  on  beneath  mine  eye. 
Still,  still  they  go;  where,  none  can  know; 

And  when  one  wave  is  gone, 
Another  and  another  yet 

Come  ever  surging  on." 

It  seems  strange  indeed  to  go  up  and  down 
some  of  these  old  historic  streets,  and  yet  never* 
in  the  course  of  one's  walk  hear  spoken  the  lan- 
guage of  the  country.  In  the  course  of  my  in- 
vestigations during  the  past  few  months,  I  have 
found  it  impossible  to  do  anything  practical 
without  an  interpreter,  sometimes  in  one  lan- 
guage, and  again  in  another.  Often  in  entering 
an  old  rear  tenement  house,"  where  filth  and 


CiliUST   CliUKCH   TOWEK. 


OLD   WORLD   TIDES   IN    BOSTON  217 

misery  held  riot,  I  have  been  astonished  at  the 
splendidly  carved  ornaments  over  the  doorways, 
and  the  still-to-be-traced  carving  on  the  balus- 
trade. Once  these  old  rear  tenements  were 
the  abodes  of  Boston's  wealthiest  and  most 
cultivated  citizens ;  but  the  Old  World  tide  has 
come  in,  and  house  after  house,  block  after  block, 
and  street  upon  street,  have  been  overwhelmed 
by  the  waves  of  people  who  speak  other  lan- 
guages, and  whose  habits  of  life  are  more  foreign 
than  their  speech. 

I  have  no  sympathy  with  those  people  who 
are  crying  out  against  all  foreigners,  yet  it  seems 
to  me  that  no  serious  student  of  the  signs  of  the 
times  can  take  other  than  a  sober  view  of  the 
submerging  tide  of  foreign  immigration  which 
has  come  into  this  country,  of  which  the  North 
End  of  Boston  is  a  suggestive  illustration. 
The  consideration  which  causes  the  most  sober 
thought  among  earnest  men  to-day,  is  the 
entirely  different  class  of  immigration  coming 
to  us  now  from  that  of  former  times.  In  the 
earlier  days  of  American  history  it  was  the 
intelligent,  self-reliant  part  of  the  European 
communities  who  dared  the  expense  and  hard- 


218  WHITE    SLAVES  * 

ship  of  the  long  sea  voyage  by  a  sailing-vessel, 
and  faced  the  exigencies  of  the  New  World. 
The  immigrants  of  those  days  were  mostly 
farmers  and  skilled  mechanics,  who  brought 
with  them  the  habit  and  prestige  of  success. 
But  under  the  new  order  of  things,  with  the 
great  steam  ferries  which  make  a  passage  to 
America  only  a  brief  holiday  trip  of  a  week, 
with  reduced  rates,  and  controlled  by  companies 
who  scour  every  European  city,  by  aid  of  their 
agents,  to  gather  in  their  human  cargoes  from 
the  poorest  and  most  ignorant  of  all  the  labor 
classes,  it  becomes  a  very  different  question. 

The  ftiotives  that  impel  people  to  this  country 
now,  are  very  different  from  what  they  used  to 
be.  The  San  Francisco  Alia  well  says :  "  The 
time  was  when  the  majority  of  foreign  immi- 
grants came  because  of  an  intelligent  devotion 
to  free  government.  Ninety-nine  per  cent  of 
them  were  free  from  merely  material  motives. 
They  were  not  urged  by  starvation,  they  did  not 
come  in  the  squalid  steerage,  they  did  not,  on 
landing,  feel  compelled  to  invent  servile  occu- 
pations, before  unknown  in  this  country,  merely 
to  get  the  crusts  and  scraps  that  would  keep 


OLD    WOULD    TIDES    IN    BOSTON 


219 


them  alive.     Their  motive  was  intellectual  more 
than  material.     Their  descendants  are  found  in 


ON   THE   CUNAKDEK. 


every  State,    of   good   report,   foremost  among 
the  fibres  that  make    up  American    character. 


O.'  THI 

UNIVERSITY 


220  WHITE    SLAVES 

Their  blood  may  have  been  in  the  beginning 
English,  Irish,  Scotch,  French,  Italian,  Span- 
ish, German,  Scandinavian,  or  Slav.  No  matter : 
they  are  now  Americans,  because  the  expatria- 
tion of  their  ancestors  was  real,  and  not  unreal. 
Its  motive  was  ethical,  and  not  material.  At 
present  ninety-nine  per  cent  of  all  immigrants 
come  for  material  reasons  only.  Their  decision 
to  migrate  to  the  United  States  is  not  for  lack 
of  liberty,  but  for  lack  of  bread.  The  purpose 
is  animal  entirely.  Every  old  emigrant  from 
any  country  in  Europe  knows  this  to  be  so. 
The  Italian  who  genuinely  expatriated  himself, 
who  believed  in  Joseph  Mazzini,  and  sought  lib- 
erty  for  its  own  sake,  finds  no  fraternity  in  the 
Italian  immigration  that  has  poured  upon  us 
since  the  suppression  of  the  murder  guilds  of 
Sicily,  and  the  decline  of  the  industry  of  assas- 
sination in  that  country." 

I  think  it  is  indeed  one  of  the  hopeful  fea- 
tures of  the  situation  that  nearly  all  our  adopted 
citizens,  who  are  themselves  thoroughly  Ameri- 
canized, share  strongly  in  this  view.  Indeed, 
many  of  them  seem  to  realize  the  danger  more 
keenly  than  do  the  native-born  citizens.  I  was 


OX   THE    WAY    TO    THE    liAliUI 


OLD    WORLD   TIDES    IN    BOSTON  223 

very  much  interested,  at  the  New  England 
Chautauqua  the  other  day,  to  hear  Mr.  John 
M.  Langston,  the  colored  orator  of  Virginia, 
read  a  letter  from  a  leading  Hebrew  of  Wash- 
ington City,  in  which  he  reminded  Mr.  Lang- 
ston that  he  had  often  pleaded  the  cause  of  the 
Negro,  and  appealed  to  him  in  turn  to  plead  the 
cause  of  the  Hebrew,  by  arousing  public  senti- 
ment against  the  too  rapid  influx  of  Russian 
Jews. 

The  swift  incoming  of  these  Old  World 
tides  has  very  close  relation  to  the  wages  of 
laboring  people.  Large  numbers  of  the  alien 
laborers  who  are  coming  now,  are  little  better 
than  "  slaves  of  contractors,  steamship  lines, 
and  the  professional  European  jobbers  in  pauper 
labor.  The  large  proportion  of  those  engaged 
in  our  mines  and  on  public  works  have  been 
secured  through  these  sources,  either  in  direct 
defiance  of  our  laws  or  by  the  evasion  of  the 
laws.  They  come  in  direct  competition  with 
the  native-born  and  the  worthy  foreign  immi- 
grant, who  comes  here  for  the  purpose  of  apply- 
ing for  citizenship  and  securing  a  home.  They 
not  only  come  into  competition  with  every 


224 


WHITE    SLAVES 


worthy  class  of  laborers,  but  they  are,  for  the 
most  part,  too  ignorant  to  comprehend  Ameri- 


PASSING    THE   QUARANTINE   DOCTOR. 

can   institutions,  and  have  no   broader  idea  of 
liberty  than  to  insist  that  it  includes  license. 


OLD    WORLD   TIDES    IN    BOSTON  225 

At  every  point  of  contact  with  our  labor  sys- 
tem, they  debase  it." 

An  illustration  of  this  class  of  labor  may  be 
found  in  the  fact  that  a  year  or  two  ago  forty- 
seven  alien  miners  employed  in  phosphate  mines 
near  Waterboro,  S.  C.,  were  imprisoned  because 
they  refused  to  fulfil  the  contract  under  which 
they  had  been  employed.  Their  story  was  that 
they  had  been  met  at  Castle  Garden  by  labor 
agents  who  induced  them  to  sign  a  paper  which 
they  did  not  understand,  but  which  proved  to 
be  a  contract  to  work  for  one  and  two  dollars  a 
week  in  the  phosphate  mines,  and  board  them- 
selves. When  they  learned,  on  their  first  pay- 
day, of  the  trick  which  had  been  played  upon 
them,  they  revolted.  A  few  days  in  jail,  how- 
ever, induced  them  to  return  to  work  on  the  old 
terms. 

The  Chicago  America,  commenting  on  the 
incident,  says  this  picture  is  a  startling  contrast 
to  the  prate  of  demagogues  concerning  the  dig- 
nity of  American  labor.  While  they  scheme 
to  get  the  votes  of  intelligent  workingmen, 
labor  in  many  parts  of  this  country  is  being 
enslaved  by  means  of  the  hordes  of  foreigners 


226  WHITE   SLAVES 

who  are  imported  in  violation  of  law  and  right. 
Mr.  Powderly  tells,  in  the  North  American  Re- 
view, of  a  visit  which  he  paid  to  a  mining-camp 
to  investigate  the  conditioji  of  the  men  who 
were  imported  to  take  the  places  of  American 
workmen  who  had  demanded  higher  wages  for 
labor  done.  These  men  lived  in  huge  barracks. 
Their  dining-room,  smoking-room,  sitting-room, 
kitchen,  and  bedchamber  were  one.  There  were 
five  rows  of  bnnks,  three  deep,  each  one  thirty 
inches  in  width  and  seventy-eight  inches  long  — 
the  first  bunk  eighteen  inches  from  the  floor, 
the  next,  supported  by  rough  hemlock  posts, 
but  two  feet  above  it,  and  a  third  two  feet 
above  the  second  one.  Each  bunk  was  filled 
with  straw,  and  covered  with  coarse  coffee-sack 
material  for  bed-clothing.  Two  rows  of  hemlock 
boards,  each  one  twenty  feet  in  length  by  three 
feet  in  width,  constituted  the  tables.  The  men 
came  in  from  the  mines  while  he  was  present, 
and,  before  washing  face  or  hands,  sat  down  to 
their  supper  of  salt  pork,  meal,  and  water.  One 
hundred  and  five  men  lived  in  a  building  one 
hundred  and  sixty  feet  in  length  by  thirty  feet 
in  width.  He  found  no  one  to  answer  him  in 


OLD   WORLD   TIDES   IN    BOSTON  227 

the  English  tongue.  When  it  was  bedtime 
they  lay  down  without  divesting  themselves  of 
a  single  article  of  clothing ;  some  of  them  took 
off  their  shoes,  but  the  majority  did  not  even 
do  that.  These  men  took  the  places  of  Ameri- 
can workmen  who  were  receiving  from  two  dol- 
lars to  two  dollars  and  a  half  per  day.  The 
compensation  allowed  them  was  but  seventy- 
five  cents  a  day,  and  board.  As  a  careful  in- 
vestigation proved  that  fifteen  and  three-eighths 
cents  would  provide  the  food  furnished  each 
man,  the  outlay  was  but  ninety  and  three- 
eighths  cents  a  day.  It  is  getting  to  be  quite  a 
common  custom  on  railroads  and  in  mines  and 
other  places  where  this  class  of  laborers  are 
employed,  to  attach  to  the  waistband  of  each 
man  a  leather  strap  fastened  to  a  large  brass 
check,  similar  to  a  baggage  check.  Every 
check  bears  a  number,  and  the  man  who  carries 
it,  or  to  whom  it  is  fastened,  is  known  by  the 
number  on  his  check.  Mr.  Powderly  grimly 
comments :  "  Fancy  the  future  of  the  American 
laborer,  whose  name  is  forgotten,  and  whose 
only  means  of  identification  rests  with  a  brass 
check,  which  may  be  substituted  for  another 


228  WHITE    SLAVES 

while  he  sleeps."  If  this  is  not  white  slavery, 
what  is  it  ? 

These  Old  World  tides  have  also  close  rela- 
tion to  the  health  of  our  cities.  Large  num- 
bers of  these  people  have  been  accustomed  to 
live  in  crowded  quarters,  on  insufficient  food, 
and  without  any  regard  for  cleanliness,  in  their 
native  country.  They  come  here,  bringing  all 
their  filthy  habits,  bred  in  them  sometimes  for 
generations.  I  have  no  doubt  that  some  of  my 
ciitics  tell  the  truth  when  they  say  that  the 
squalid  tenements  occupied  by  the  Russian 
Jews  and  Italians  in  Boston  are  better  than  the 
homes  whence  they  came.  So  far  as  these  for- 
eigners themselves  are  concerned,  even  these 
wretched  conditions  are  perhaps  an  upward  step 
in  evolution.  But  if  we  are  going  to  have 
Naples  in  Boston,  we  must  expect  to  have 
Neapolitan  cholera  epidemics  as  well. 

These  Old  World  tides  have  also  a  very  close 
relation  to  the  morals  of  our  people.  An  over- 
whelming majority  of  all  the  criminals  who 
figure  in  our  police  courts,  and  are  supported  in 
our  jails  and  penitentiaries,  were  born  abroad. 
This  is  very  easy  to  understand  when  one 


OLD    WOULD    TIDES    IN    BOSTON 


229 


investigates  a  little    the  methods   used  to  en- 
courage   emigration  to   this    country.     The  in- 


SUliGICAL    THEOLOGY. 


vestigation   made   by    the    Ford    Congressional 
committee    revealed    the   enormous    extent   to 


230  WHITE   SLAVES 

which  steamship  companies  are  drumming 
Europe  for  human  freight,  to  be  dumped  on 
our  shores.  "  To  these  unscrupulous  '  fishers  of 
men '  everything  that  walks  or  crawls  is  accept- 
able. Quantity,  not  quality,  is  the  desideratum. 
The  worse  the  specimen,  the  more  effective, 
usually,  is  the  emigration  prize  offered,  and  the 
less  the  opposition  interposed  by  government 
officials.  In  a  word,  a  drag-net  has  been 
thrown  over  nearly  the  entire  European  conti- 
nent, with  the  result  of  having  recently  col- 
lected for  shipment  to  this  country  a  class  of 
humanity,  which,  wherever  it  may  be,  is  a  men- 
ace to  good  order  and  a  tax  upon  the  police 
and  charity  departments  of  the  country." 

One  who  speaks  with  the  highest  authority 
on  questions  of  political  economy  puts  the  im- 
migration problem  in  a  strong  light  when  he  7 
says  :  "We  are  now  draining  off  great  stagnant 
pools  of  population  which  no  current  of  intel- 
lectual or  moral  activity  has  stirred  for  ages. 
Thousands  and  hundreds  of  thousands  of  those 
who  represent  the  very  lowest  stage  of  degra- 
dation to  which  human  beings  can  be  reduced 
by  hopelessness,  hunger,  squalor,  and  supersti- 


OLD   WORLD   TIDES   IK   BOSTON  231 

tion,  are  found  among  the  new  citizens  whom 
the  last  decade  has  brought  into  the  Republic." 
It  is  known  beyond  doubt  that  prisoners'  aid 
societies  in  various  European  countries  have 
been  steadily  shipping  convicts  to  the  United 
States.  Neither  has  it  been  an  uncommon 
thing  for  criminals  to  be  let  off  by  the  courts, 
on  condition  of  their  emigrating  to  America. 
It  is  folly  for  us  to  expect  to  take  this  great 
criminal  class,  who  were  born  to  crime  in  the 
purlieus  of  European  cities,  who  have  been 
thieves  from  their  cradles,  and  who  come  to  us 
fresh  from  jails  and  prisons,  and  change  them 
into  useful  citizens.  They  will  not  only  con- 
tinue to  be  criminals  themselves,  but  they 
will  spread  their  vile  and  wicked  contagion 
wherever  they  go.  There  is  not  a  single 
cause  of  reform  or  progress  in  this  country 
that  is  not  constantly  discouraged  and  post- 
poned by  these  Old  World  tides  of  ignorance 
and  vice. 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that  there  is  a  rising 
tide  of  public  sentiment  in  this  country  in 
favor  of  a  careful  and  wise  examination  of  every 
emigrant  who  offers  himself  as  a  candidate  for 


232 


WHITE   SLAVES 


American  citizenship  in  the  future.  I  think,  in 
view  of  the  fact  that  we  are  getting  a  very 
large  and  increasing  proportion  of  our  immigra- 
tion from  Southern  Europe,  which  is  the  most 


BUILDING  USED  BY  THE  BlilTlSH  AS  A  HOSPITAL. 

illiterate  portion  of  the  Old  World  —  in  South- 
ern Italy,  for  instance,  seventy-nine  out  of 
every  one  hundred  are  illiterate  —  there  ought 
to  be  an  educational  test.  There  is  certainly  no 
wisdom  in  our  adding  hundreds  of  thousands  a 
year  to  the  number  of  illiterates  already  here, 


OLD   WORLD   TIDES    IN    BOSTON  233 

who  are  unable  to  read  the  Declaration  of 
Independence,  and  have  not  the  faintest  con- 
ception of  the  principles  of  our  Constitution. 
/  The  examination  of  emigrants  ought  to  be  on 
the  other  side  of  the  water.  We  have  had 
many  recent  illustrations  in  Boston  of  the  man- 
ifest hardships  experienced  under  the  present 
arrangement.  Every  person  intending  to  emi- 
grate to  America  ought  to  be  required  to  give 
notice  of  that  desire  through  the  nearest  Amer- 
ican Consul,  and  furnish  a  clean  bill  of  health, 
both  moral  and  physical ;  and  no  one  should  be 
permitted  to  sail  without  a  certificate  of  such 
investigation  and  satisfactory  finding.  This 
would  not  shut  out  any  one  who  would  be  of 
value  to  American  institutions,  but  it  would 
require  European  countries  to  care  for  the  crim- 
inals and  paupers  which  their  own  social  system 
has  bred. 

But  what  shall  we  do  with  these  multitudes 
of  foreigners  who  are  already  living  in  our 
midst?  In  the  first  place,  we  must  cease  to  re\ 
gard  them  as  foreigners  or  aliens,  and  set  to 
work  with  a  definite  purpose  to  Americanize 
them  as  quickly  as  possible.  We  must  not,  for 


234  WHITE   SLAVES 

a  moment,  be  satisfied  to  let  them  herd  together 
in  the  filth  and  squalor  to  which  they  may  have 
been  accustomed  at  home.  We  cannot  afford 
to  hand  them  over  to  the  greedy  tyranny  of  the 
sweater.  Nothing  will  help  us  more  than  the 
abolition  of  the  neglected  tenement  house,  and 
the  provision  for  a  healthier,  cleaner  shelter  for 
the  people. 

Some  of  our  public-spirited  men  of  wealth 
cannot  do  better  than  to  look  in  this  direction 
as  a  field  in  which  to  make  their  mark  upon  the 
uplift  of  their  race  and  their  time.  There  is  a 
far  greater  demand  for  this  class  of  benevolent 
investments  than  there  is  for  added  colleges  or 
universities.  If  some  of  the  vile  and  unhealthy 
tenements  that  have  been  described  recently, 
not  only  by  myself  but  by  the  reporters  and  the 
daily  press,  could  be  replaced  by  such  buildings 
as  the  Victoria  Square  building  in  Liverpool, 
it  would  be  a  great  public  benefaction.  On  the 
former  site  of  Victoria  Square  were  miserable 
tenement  houses.  To-day  a  magnificent  struc- 
ture stands  there,  built  around  a  hollow  square, 
the  larger  portion  of  which  is  given  up  for  a 
healthful  play-ground  for  the  children,  "  The 


OLD    WORLD   TIDES    IN    BOSTON  237 

halls  and  stairways  of  the  building  are  broad, 
light,  and  airy ;  the  ventilation  and  sanitary 
arrangements,  perfect.  The  apartments  are 
divided  into  one,  two,  and  three  rooms  each. 
No  room  is  smaller  than  thirteen  by  eight  feet 
six  inches  ;  most  of  them  are  twelve  by  thirteen 
feet  four  inches. 

"  All  the  ceilings  are  nine  feet  high.  A  super- 
intendent looks  after  the  building.  The  tenants 
are  expected  to  be  orderly,  and  keep  their  apart- 
ments clean.  The  roomy  character  of  halls 
and  chambers  may  be  inferred  from  the  fact 
that  there  are  only  two  hundred  and  seventy- 
five  apartments  in  the  entire  building.  The 
returns  on  the  total  expenditure  on  the  build- 
ing, which  was  three  hundred  and  thirty-eight 
thousand  eight  hundred  dollars,  it  is  estimated 
will  be  at  least  four  and  a  half  per  cent."  The 
rents  will  seem  miraculous  to  those  of  you  who 
have  been  following  the  prices  given  in  this 
series  of  discourses.  In  this  beautiful  Victoria 
Square  dwelling,  with  its  large,  shrub-encircled 
play-ground  for  children  attached,  light,  airy, 
three-room  tenements  are  furnished  for  one 
dollar  and  forty-four  cents  per  week.  For 


238 


WHITE   SLAVES 


those  containing  two  large  rooms  one  dollar  and 
eight  cents  a  week  is  charged ;  while  the  one- 
room  quarters  are  let  at  fifty-four  cents  a  week. 
Who  among  our  rich  men  will  lead  off  in 
some  grand  crusade  of  this  sort?  Another 

thing  we  want  to  do 
to  Americanize  these 
people,  is  to  furnish 
them  employment  un- 
der conditions  con- 
sistent with  health, 
intelligence,  and  mo- 
rality. Instead  of  the 
crowded  sweat-shop, 
the  moral  atmosphere 
of  which  is  as  filthy 
as  the  physical,  we 
must  have  factories 
conducted  in  the 
spirit  of  Christian 
civilization. 

Let  me  tell  you  of  a  vision  I  had  the  other 
day  as  I  sat  meditating  and  dreaming  in.  my 
study  chair.  I  dreamed  I  was  walking  down  the 
streets  of  an  American  city  when  I  saw  a  large 


OLD   WORLD   TIDES    IN   BOSTON  239 

brick  building  which  I  might  have  thought  was 
a  factory  except  that  there  were  white  curtains 
at  every  window  in  the  house.  As  I  neared 
the  door,  I  asked  a  passer-by  what  it  was,  and 
he  astonished  me  by  saying,  "  This  is  the  great 
Christian  factory."  Being  a  little  anxious  to 
see  what  life  in  a  really  Christian  factory  would 
be  like,  I  went  in  on* a  tour  of  investigation. 
There  were  several  hundred  employes  in  the 
factory,  most  of  whom  were  young  women. 
To  my  astonishment,  I  found  bath-tubs  in  this 
factory,  with  an  abundance  of  hot  and  cold 
water,  linen  towels,  and  toilet  soap.  Did  one 
ever  hear  of  such  luxuries  in  a  factory  of 
any  sort?  In  the  girls'  bath-room  there  were 
rugs  under  foot,  the  finishing  was  done  in  oak, 
the  trimmings  were  nickel-plated,  the  sanitary 
arrangements  were  perfect,  and  everything  was 
as  bright  and  clean  as  it  was  possible  to  make 
it.  Each  employ^  was  allowed  thirty  minutes 
for  a  bath,  and  if  one  was  so  fastidious  as  to 
need  three-quarters  of  an  hour,  no  comments 
were  made.  The  structure  was  commodious 
and  convenient,  substantially  built,  and  heated, 
lighted,  and  ventilated  throughout  according  to 


240  WHITE   SLAVES 

the  most  improved  system.  Even  the  cellar 
was  attractive  in  its  completeness,  from  the 
steam-engine  that  operated  the  machinery  of 
the  building,  to  the  culinary  department  where 
those  who  desired  could  purchase  a  noon-day 
lunch  at  actual  cost  of  material.  The  cook  in 
charge  of  the  kitchen  devoted  her  entire  time 
to  the  work.  Every  day,  tea,  with  milk  and 
sugar,  was  supplied  by  the  firm  free  of  charge ; 
oaten  meal  was  furnished  three  days  in  the 
week  at  the  same  rate.  Delicious  soup  was 
served  at  three  cents  a  bowl.  The  entire  floor 
was  carefully  cemented ;  it  was  light,  warm,  and 
clean,  and  there  were  tables  and  benches  for 
those  who  lunched  in  the  building.  An  hour 
was  allowed  at  noon,  and  while  all  were  ex- 
pected to  be  on  hand  promptly  at  one  o'clock, 
the  girls  living  at  a  distance  from  the  factory 
were  thoughtfully  permitted  to  leave  a  few 
minutes  before  twelve  o'clock. 

On  the  main  floor  goods  were  stored  in  the 
centre  of  the  room,  the  remaining  space  being 
reserved  for  the  pleasure  and  convenience  of 
the  employes.  At  one  end  of  this  spacious 
floor  there  was  an  improvised  music-room,  with 


OLD   WORLD   TIDES   IN   BOSTON 


241 


a  piano  and  window  garden,  where  the  girls 
could  sing  and  sun  themselves  every  noon. 
Opposite  was  an  enclosed  sanctum,  divided  into 
a  reading  and  reception-room.  Bright,  soft 
rugs  were  scattered  about.  The  reading-table 


was  as  well  stocked  with  current  literature  as 
a  club  man's  library  table.  The  papers  and 
periodicals  were  reserved  for  the  exclusive  use 
of  the  girls.  An  open  fireplace  was  one  of  the 
attractive  features  of  the  reception-room,  and 
there  was  a  mantel-mirror,  too  —  that  means  of 
grace  so  dear  to  the  gentler  sex. 


242  WHITE   SLAVES 

The  two  upper  floors  contained  the  work- 
tables  and  machines.  On  entering  these  work- 
rooms one  was  struck  by  the  neatness  of  the 
place.  Everything  seemed  to  have  a  white  lin- 
ing. The  atmosphere  was  not  only  clean,  but 
fresh  and  sweet.  There  were  no  rags,  no  dust, 
no  fluff,  no  smell  of  dripping  grease  from  over- 
hanging machinery.  A  special  staff  of  men 
was  constantly  employed  to  look  after  the 
premises,  and  their  vigilance  was  such  as  to 
anticipate  the  wear  and  tear.  The  abundance 
of  light  and  sunshine  would  astonish  and  de- 
light not  only  business  people,  but  school  com- 
missioners as  well.  Each  work-shop  was  the 
size  of  an  entire  floor,  so  that  light  was  admitted 
from  four  sides  of  the  building,  the  windows 
almost  adjoining  one  another.  The  white  cur- 
tains, which  softened  the  light,  gave  the  place  a 
homelike  appearance  which  was  very  pleasing. 
Another  charm  was  the  love  of  flowers.  There 
were  potted  plants  on  every  floor,  and  they 
were  as  green  and  lovely  as  if  nourished  by  a 
practical  florist.  On  making  some  inquiries,  I 
found  that  Friday  was  pay-day,  and  that  in- 
directly much  good  resulted  from  this  thought- 


OLD   WORLD   TIDES   IN   BOSTON  243 

ful  system.  Not  only  did  it  give  the  hundreds 
of  families  the  benefit  of  the  early  Saturday 
markets,  but  in  a  great  measure  did  away  with 
the  credit-books,  and,  best  of  all,  was  instru- 
mental in  keeping  the  girls  off  the  street  Satur- 
day night.  No  charges  were  imposed  upon  the 
operators.  They  did  not  have  to  buy  thread, 
pay  machine-rent,  or  replace  broken  needles. 
If  an  attachment  was  displaced,  it  was  restored 
by  the  firm,  and  even  the  girls'  scissors  were 
kept  sharpened  at  the  expense  of  the  employer. 
Hot  and  cold  water,  mirrors,  towels,  and  soap 
were  among  the  conveniences.  Posted  over 
the  stationary  wash  basins  was  this  request: 
"Please  help  with  your  forethought  to  keep 
things  clean  and  nice.  Any  attention  will 
oblige."  This  was  signed  by  the  firm.  The 
work  was  so  systematized,  and  the  training  so 
thorough,  that  the  tyrannical  forewoman  and 
domineering  foreman  had  no  place  in  the  estab- 
lishment. The  manager  was  the  only  person  to 
whom  the  hands  were  accountable.  Adjoining 
the  factory  was  a  pretty  garden  containing  a 
pear-orchard,  with  arbors  and  seats,  where  the 
girls  lunched  in  fine  weather.  Women  as  a 


244  WHITE   SLAVES 

class  show  the  effects  of  good  keeping,  and 
these  workers  were  not  an  exception.  There 
were  a  great  many  pretty  faces  among  them, 
and  not  one  that  betrayed  "  boss-fright "  or 
time-terror.  As  a  class  they  looked  more  like 


normal  college  students  than  factory  hands. 
Compared  with  overworked,  nerve-strained, 
anxious-faced  girls  in  the  sweat-shops,  and 
indeed  in  most  shops  and  factories,  these  trim, 
tidy-looking,  cheerful  and  contented  women 
seemed  to  me  the  very  noblesse  of  the  industrial 
world. 


OLD   WORLD   TIDES    IN   BOSTON  245 

Ah  !  you  may  say,  that  is  only  an  idle  and 
visionary  dream  ;  and  no  doubt  my  critic  of  a  few 
weeks  ago,  who  thought  I  belonged  to  the  most 
dangerous  class  in  the  community  when  I  was 
describing  the  misery  of  the  "  white  slaves  of  the 
Boston  sweaters,"  would  be  ready  to  say  that  I 
am  engaged  in  a  scarcely  less  dangerous  task  in 
putting  such  ideal  and  impossible  dreams  into 
the  heads  of  working-girls.  But,  dear  sceptical 
friend,  what  I  have  been  telling  you  is  not  a 
dream  at  all,  but  a  heavenly  reality  that  is  going 
on  in  this  modern  work-a-day  world,  in  the  city 
of  Newark,  N.  J.,  and  I  have  merely  been  sum- 
marizing for  you  the  report  of  Nell  Nelson  in 
the  New  York  World,  giving  an  account  of  the 
Christian  experiment  of  Ferris  Brothers'  factory 
for  the  making  of  corset  waists. 

I  was  at  this  point  in  my  discourse  on 
Thursday  at  half-past  one  o'clock,  when  I  said 
to  myself,  "  Isn't  it  a  little  hazardous  to  take  all 
this  for  fact,  even  on  the  authority  of  a  news- 
paper reporter  ?  Will  not  a  great  many  of  your 
audience  say  it  is  only  a  pleasing  fancy  of  a 
reporter's  imagination?"  So  at  three  o'clock 
I  was  on  the  train  for  New  York,  and  at  eleven 


246  WHITE   SLAVES 

that  evening  I  was  in  bed  in  a  hotel  in 
Newark. 

Friday  morning,  at  half-past  seven,  I  was 
going  through  ,.Ferris  Brothers'  factory.  It  is 
with  great  pleasure  that  I  tell  you  that,  on 
returning,  I  did  not  have  to  strike  out  a  single 
word  I  had  written.  On  every  side  were  evi- 
dences of  thoughtfulness ;  for  instance,  a  large 
portion  of  the  girls  employed  live  in  a  section 
of  the  city  to  the  rear  of  the  factory.  In  order 
to  save  the  extra  walk  of  a  block  or  two,  three 
hundred  additional  keys  have  been  made  to  the 
orchard  gate,  so  that  they  can  come  and  go 
that  way.  A  large  number  of  umbrellas  are 
kept  in  the  office.  If  a  girl  is  caught  at  the 
factory  in  an  unexpected  shower,  she  finds  an 
umbrella  waiting  to  be  loaned  in  just  such  an 
emergency. 

With  the  manager  I  went  through  the  culi- 
nary department.  They  make  ice-cream  now 
every  day,  and  sell  large  plates  to  the  girls 
for  three  cents.  A  careful  account  is  kept  of 
the  cost,  and  the  manager  said  he  thought  he 
should  be  able  to  reduce  the  cream  to  two 
cents  a  plate. 


OLD    WORLD   TIDES   IN   BOSTON  249 

I  looked  through  the  reading-room  and  over 
the  carefully  selected  lists  of  papers.  The 
manager  said  that  among  the  girls  were  some 
excellent  musicians,  and  others  with  good  liter- 
ary abilities,  and  told  me,  I  thought  with  a 
pardonable  degree  of  pride,  that  a  few  months 
since,  when  some  desirable  positions  in  the 
Newark  Public  Library  were  open  to  compe- 
tition, the  two  young  ladies  from  the  Ferris 
Brothers'  factory  who  were  successful,  scored 
ninety-five  points  out  of  a  possible  hundred  in 
their  literary  examination.  No  employe*  works 
more  than  nine  and  one-quarter  hours  a  day, 
and  Saturday  afternoon  is  free.  The  average 
wages,  including  beginners  and  help  girls,  is 
seven  dollars  a  week,  and  a  good  worker  makes 
twelve  dollars. 

You  may  say  that  many  of  these  things  that 
I  have  mentioned  are  insignificant  and  only 
trifles,  but,  after  all,  it  is  such  things  as  these 
that  in  a  large  degree  make  or  unmake  our 
human  lives ;  and  a  human  life  is  no  trifle. 

But  lest  some  hard-headed  business  man 
shall  shake  his  head  and  say,  "  The  fools  will 
bankrupt  themselves,"  I  must  add,  that  aside 


250  WHITE   SLAVES 

from  the  beauty  and  grace  of  this  thoughtful 
business  philanthropy,  the  enterprise  has  been 
entirely  satisfactory  from  a  commercial  stand- 
point, the  firm  agreeing  that  not  only  have  their 
employes  done  more,  but  better,  work  than 
ever  before.  One  of  the  firm  assured  me  that, 
while  there  were,  of  course,  many  discourag- 
ing things  and  occasionally  an  employe  who 
showed  little  appreciation,  on  the  whole  there 
had  been  a  steady  improvement  during  their 
three  years'  experience  in  this  factory,  and 
under  no  circumstances  would  they  be  willing 
to  go  back  to  the  old  factory  regime. 

To  contrast  a  factory  like  this  with  some  of 
the  sweat-shops  I  have  visited,  is  like  contrast- 
ing heaven  with  hell.  There  may  be,  and  I 
doubt  not  are,  many  other  factories  where  the 
same  Christian  thoughtfulness  is  exercised  in 
the  treatment  of  employes,  as  here.  Upon  all 
such  may  the  benediction  of  Heaven  rest !  May 
their  numbers  be  multiplied ! 

The  Church,  too  — I  mean  the  great  Catholic 
Church,  formed  of  all  the  branches  of  our 
Christianity  "  who  love  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ 
in  sincerity "  —  must  open  its  arms  with  a 


OLD    WORLD    TIDES    IN    BOSTON  251 

heartier  tone  of  welcome  and  brotherhood  to 
the  tried  and  disheartened  working-people. 
Nothing  in  recent  art  has  stirred  me  so  deeply 
as  a  dim  copy  of  Hacker's  "  Christ  and  the 
Magdalene,"  reproduced  by  Mr.  Stead  in  the 
Review  of  Reviews.  The  Christ  is  standing 
with  coarse  clothing  and  toil-worn  hands  by 
the  work-bench  in  the  carpenter-shop  at  Naza- 
reth. The  shavings  are  heaped  in  piles  around 
him  on  the  otherwise  bare  floor,  while  kneel- 
ing at  his  feet  in  penitence  and  trust  is 
the  Magdalene.  Brothers,  it  is  this  carpenter 
Christ,  as  Frances  Willard  aptly  puts  it,  "  the 
Monday  Christ,"  for  whom  the  toil-worn  world 
hungers,  and  will  welcome  when  it  sees 
Him  manifested  in  us,  in  the  shop,  the  fac- 
tory, and  the  counting-room,  as  well  as  in  the 
church. 

Zoe  Dana  Underhill  sings,  in  Harper's  Maga- 
zine, a  song  the  modern  Church  needs  to  learn, 
until  its  great  heart  shall  throb  with  its  spirit. 

"  The  Master  called  to  His  reapers, 
4  Make  scythe  and  sickle  keen, 
And  bring  me  the  grain  from  the  uplands, 
And  the  grass  from  the  meadows  green, 


252  WHITE   SLAVES 

And  from  off  the  mist-clad  marshes, 
Where  the  salt  waves  fret  and  foam, 

Ye  shall  gather  the  rustling  sedges, 
To  furnish  the  harvest-home.' 


Then  the  laborers  cried,  *  O  Master, 
We  will  bring  Thee  the  yellow  grain 

That  waves  on  the  windy  hillside, 
And  the  tender  grass  from  the  plain ; 


OLD    WORLD   TIDES    IN    BOSTON  253 

But  that  which  springs  on  the  marshes 

Is  dry  and  harsh  and  thin, 
Unlike  the  sweet  field-grasses, 

So  we  will  not  gather  it  in.' 

But  the  Master  said,  i  Q  foolish ! 

For  many  a  weary  day, 
Through  storm  and  drought,  ye  have  labored 

For  the  grain  and  the  fragrant  hay. 
The  generous  earth  is  fruitful, 

And  breezes  of  summer  blow 
Where  these,  in  the  sun  and  the  dews  of  heaven, 

Have  ripened  soft  and  slow. 

4  But  out  on  the  wide,  bleak  marshland 

Hath  never  a  plough  been  set, 
And  with  rapine  and  rage  of  hungry  waves 

The  shivering  soil  is  wet. 
There  flower  the  pale  green  sedges, 

And  the  tides  that  ebb  and  flow, 
And  the  biting  breath  of  the  sea-wind 

Are  the  only  care  they  know. 

'  They  have  drunken  of  bitter  waters, 

Their  food  hath  been  sharp  sea-sand ; 
And  yet  they  have  yielded  a  harvest 

Unto  the  Master's  hand. 
So  shall  ye  all,  O  reapers, 

Honor  them  now  the  more, 
And  garner  in  gladness,  with  songs  of  praise, 

The  grass  from  the  desolate  shore.'  5: 


OUR    BROTHERS    AND    SISTERS,    THE 
BOSTON  PAUPERS 


1  And  Sir  Launfal  said,  '  I  behold  in  thee, 
An  image  of  Him  who  died  on  the  tree; 

Mild  Mary's  Son,  acknowledge  me; 
Behold,  through  Him,  I  give  to  thee!" 

JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL  :  Sir  Launfal. 


X 


OUR   BROTHERS   AND    SISTERS,   THE 
BOSTON   PAUPERS 

"  Now  there  was  a  certain  rich  man  and  he  was  clothed 
in  purple  and  fine  linen,  faring  sumptuously  every  day:  and 
a  certain  beggar  named  Lazarus  was  laid  at  his  gate  full  of 
sores." 

**  Inasmuch  as  ye  did  it  unto  one  of  these  my  brethren, 
even  these  least,  ye  did  it  unto  Me." 

nPHESE  two  views  of  poverty  ever  stand  over 
J_  against  each  other.  They  are  the  same  to- 
day as  when  so  graphically  described  by  Jesus  of 
Nazareth.  The  one  looks  on  poverty  with  con- 
tempt ;  it  is  the  view  of  selfishness.  The  other 
looks  upon  it  with  sympathetic  brotherhood; 
the  view  of  humanity  at  its  highest  attainment, 
or  from  the  standpoint  of  Jesus  Christ.  Both 
these  scriptures,  however,  agree  in  teaching  us 
the  solemnity  of  our  relation  to  our  neighbors 
who  are  in  trouble  or  poverty.  Mrs.  Gather- 
wood,  in  her  story  of  "  The  Lady  of  Fort  St. 
John,"  in  the  August  Atlantic  Monthly  —  a 
257 


258  WHITE   SLAVES 

tale  of  the  early  French  settlements  in  this 
country,  illustrates  one  of  the  old  supersti- 
tions by  a  weird  tale  of  an  old  Hollander  who 
had  married  a  very  young  wife  who,  when  he 
came  to  die,  was  still  only  a  girl ;  and  the  cun- 
ning old  Dutchman  endeavored  to  maintain  his 
supremacy  over  her  after  his  death  by  grimly 
providing  in  his  will  that  his  right  hand  should 
be  severed  from  his  body,  and,  preserved  by 
some  rare  chemical  process,  should  always  re- 
main in  the  possession  of  his  widow  as  her  most 
sacred  treasure ;  for  if  she  lost  or  destroyed 
it,  or  failed  to  look  on  it  once  a  month,  name- 
less and  weird  calamities,  foreseen  by  the  dying 
man,  must  light  not  only  on  her,  but  on  those 
who  loved  her  best.  And  so,  long  after  he  was 
in  his  grave,  that  horrible  memento  of  the  past 
held  this  poor  woman  in  the  clasp  of  its  skele- 
ton fingers,  and  guided  her  course  across  the 
oceans,  and  into  distant  lands.  This  was  the 
grip  of  a  superstition  only ;  but  there  is  a  real 
grip  of  the  udead  hand,"  of  which  this  ghostly 
story  is  only  a  faint  intimation  —  the  grip  of 
yesterday  on  to-day  —  of  to-day  on  to-morrow 
—  the  grip  of  my  duty  toward  my  neighbor  that 


OUR   BROTHERS    AND    SISTERS  259 

cannot  be  shaken  off,  which  even  death  itself 
does  not  loosen. 

There  is,  perhaps,  no  keener  test  of  the 
standing  of  a  person  or  a  city  in  the  scale  of 
civilization,  than  their  treatment  of  the  sick  or 
helpless  poor  dependent  upon  them.  Dives, 
the  barbarian,  whether  in  Jerusalem  two  thou- 
sand years  ago,  or  in  Boston  to-day,  lets  the 
poor  lie  at  his  gate  in  indifference,  at  the  mercy 
of  every  scavenger  that  may  prey  upon  them. 
The  "  Good  Samaritan,"  whether  on  the  road  to 
Jericho,  or  at  Rainsford  Island,  stops  with  sym- 
pathetic eye,  a  helpful  hand,  and  open  purse  to 
share  his  best  with  the  victim  of  misfortune 
or  wrong. 

We  come  this  morning  to  examine  into  the 
attitude  of  Boston  toward  her  paupers  who  are 
cared  for  in  the  two  institutions  at  Long  Island 
and  Rainsford  Island.  I  have  made  repeated 
visits  to  these  islands,  and  approach  this  discus- 
sion only  after  many  weeks  of  reflection,  and 
a  careful  sifting  of  the  information  received. 
I  have  hesitated  about  treating  the  subject  at 
all,  because  a  criticism  of  a  public  institution  is 
supposed  by  so  many  people  to  mean  a  personal 


260  WHITE   SLAVES 

accusation  or  attack  upon  the  parties  in  charge 
of  it.  I  wish  to  say,  in  the  beginning,  that  so 
far  as  I  have  been  able  to  see,  the  officers  imme- 
diately in  charge  of  these  institutions  are  kind- 
hearted  and  humane,  and  are  endeavoring  to  do 
the  best  they  can,  with  the  means  at  their 
disposal.  After  saying  that,  I  propose,  with- 
out any  regard  as  to  whom  it  may  please  or 
displease,  to  point  out  candidly  what  seems  to 
me  inexcusable  thoughtlessness  and  grievous 
errors  in  the  treatment  of  the  paupers  in  these 
institutions. 

The  largest  and  best  building  is  on  Long 
Island.  Here  the  men  are  kept.  There  are 
about  three  hundred  on  the  average,  but  this  is 
increased  to  between  four  and  five  hundred  in 
the  winter.  And  right  here  is  a  wrong  that 
ought  to  be  righted. 

The  excuse  for  careless  and  indifferent  treat- 
ment of  the  really  deserving  pauper  men  who 
are  on  Long  Island  is  that  every  winter  the 
place  is  crowded  with  "  bummers  "  who  come  to 
Long  Island  in  the  winter  for  free  quarters,  and 
as  soon  as  the  weather  is  fine  for  out-door 
tramping  in  the  summer,  they  go  away  to 


OUR   BROTHERS   AND   SISTERS 


261 


escape  work  in  the  institution,  coming  back 
again  in  cold  weather.  It  would  certainly  be 
very  easy  to  devise  a  law  to  make  this  impos- 
sible. No  able-bodied  person  who  is  able  to 


TRAMPS. 


work,  ought  under  any  circumstances  to  be  sent 
to  the  almshouse.  People  who  are  able  to  work 
and  support  themselves,  and  do  not  do  so  under 
their  own  direction,  ought  to  be  sent  to  the 
work-house,  and  compelled  to  do  so  under  the 


262  WHITE   SLAVES 

direction  of  a  proper  officer.  This  would  take 
away  from  Long  Island  a  lot  of  drunken  tramps 
who  congregate  there  in  the  winter.  The  same 
remark  applies  to  women.  The  intemperate 
and  vicious  woman  ought  not  to  be  sent  to  the 
almshouse;  it  should  be  sacredly  kept  as  "a 
refuge  and  a  home  where  the  respectable  poor, 
the  sick,  and  the  old  —  those  who  have  outlived 
their  children,  or  have  broken  down  in  the  race 
of  life  —  may  find  shelter  and  care."  But  the 
honest  cases  ought  not,  and  need  not,  suffer  in 
order  to  punish  these  frauds.  At  Long  Island, 
on  one  of  my  visits,  there  were  ninety-two  men 
on  the  sick-roll,  and  only  one  nurse,  and  he  not 
a  trained  nurse.  I  am  also  satisfied  that  the 
food  is  insufficient  either  for  sick  or  well.  A 
reporter  of  the  Boston  Post  managed  to  inter- 
rogate an  old  man  who  was  able  to  sit  up  by  the 
side  of  his  little  cot.  In  answer  to  a  question, 
this  sick  old  man  said  they  did  not  get  any 
milk ;  and  yet  there  is  a  large  farm  attached  to 
the  institution,  and  there  is  no  excuse  for  not 
having  plenty  of  milk  provided  at  very  little 
expense  for  these  infirm  old  people.  The  old 
man  said  they  had  meat  three  times  a  week  — 


OUR    BROTHERS    AND   SISTERS  263 


remember  that  means  three  meals  out  of  twenty- 
one  ;  and  when  asked  by  the  reporter,  "  What 
kind  of  meat?"  he  answered  pathetically,  "It 
wouldn't  do  any  good  for  me  to  tell  you,  sir, 
but  it's  mighty  poor  stuff."  Permit  me  to  quote 
in  full  a  little  article  in  the  Boston  Herald 
of  a  few  weeks  since,  under  the  title,  "  Some 
Harbor  Policemen  Overpowered  by  Long  Island 
Hospitality  :  "  — 

"  There  is  a  little  joke  which  is  causing  con- 
siderable merriment  at  the  Harbor  police  station 
at  the  present  time,  and  the  key  to  it  is  con- 
tained in  the  words,  4  Long  Island  hospitality.' 
A  few  days  ago  the  police-boat  6  Protector ' 
was  ordered  to  take  to  Long  Island  a  party  of 
surveyors,  who  were  to  lay  out  grounds  for 
the  proposed  new  hospital. 

"The  work  of  the  boat's  passengers  occupied 
an  unexpectedly  long  time,  and  as  no  provis- 
ion had  been  made  for  dinner,  the  party  in- 
voked the  hospitality  of  the  almshouse  on  the 
island.  The  surveyors  and  officers  of  the  boat 
were  assigned  to  one  part  of  the  institution, 
while  the  crew  were  invited  into  the  large  din- 
ing-hall,  usually  occupied  by  the  inmates.  It 


264  WHITE    SLAVES 

is  this  last-named  party  which  is  bearing  the 
brunt  of  the  joke.  The  feast  of  which  they 
were  invited  to  partake  consisted  of  a  lot  of 
potatoes  with  their  jackets  on,  without  the  for- 
mality of  a  platter,  a  plate  of  what  the  boys 
termed  c  soup-meat,'  a  soup-dish  minus  the 
soup,  knives  and  forks,  and  empty  mugs. 
Grace  was  omitted ;  the  men  spent  the  time  in 
gazing  first  at  the  c  feast,'  and  then  at  each  other. 
A  common  thought  seemed  to  occupy  the  minds 
of  all,  for  without  a  word  they  simultaneously 
arose  from  the  table  and  left  the  room. 

"  They  waited  at  the  boat  until  the  surveyors' 
work  had  been  completed,  and  then  came  back 
to  Boston.  It  was  then  time  to  make  the  reg- 
ular afternoon  trip,  and  with  empty  stomachs 
they  started  out  again  and  finished  the  day. 
It  was  the  intention  of  the  victims  to  keep  the 
matter  c  shady ; '  but  the  joke  leaked  out,  as 
such  things  will,  and  it  is  worse  than  shaking  a 
red  rag  at  a  bull  to  say  '  Long  Island  hospital- 
ity' to  certain  blue-coats  who  labor  on  the 
water."  And  yet  they  were  there  at  one  of 
the  three  lucky  meals  out  of  twenty-one,  when 
there  was  "  soup-meat." 


OUR   BROTHERS    AND    SISTERS  265 

Among  the  men  in  this  institution  was  pointed 
out  to  me  a  marble-cutter,  who  was  a  thoroughly 
respectable,  self-supporting  workman.  He  was 
hurt  while  at  work  by  the  falling  of  a  stone, 
and  so  disabled  by  an  injury  of  the  spine  that 
he  was  unable  to  continue  employment.  As 
soon  as  sickness  had  used  up  what  money  he 
had,  having  no  relatives  who  could  help  him, 
there  was  nothing  left  for  him  but  to  come  here. 
One  of  the  officers  spoke  of  him  in  the  highest 
terms,  and  told  me  how,  without  direction 
from  any  one  else,  he  sought  by  many  daily  cir- 
cuits of  the  building  to  strengthen  his  spine. 
I  was  assured  by  the  same  officer  that  many 
others  who  were  inmates  were  there  purely 
through  misfortune  which  was  from  no  fault  of 
their  own,  but  from  such  accidents  as  are  likely 
to  happen  to  any  honest  laboring-man.  Now  I 
maintain  that  such  men  ought  to  be  treated  with 
a  decent  regard  for  their  self-respect,  and  given 
a  comfortable  home.  It  is  an  outrage  that  this 
marble-cutter,  and  others  like  him,  are  fed  more 
shabbily  than  if  they  had  been  convicted  of  a 
crime. 

In  addition  to  the  men  on  Long  Island,  there 


266  WHITE   SLAVES 

is  one  ward  in  the  hospital  used  for  women. 
There  were  fifty-two  sick  women  crowded  into 
this  ward  at  the  time  of  my  visit.  There  was 
only  one  nurse,  an  excellent  woman,  but  with 
no  special  education  for  her  duties.  The 
night  helper  is  a  woman  who  is  hired  for 
fifty  cents  a  day.  For  this  ward  of  fifty-two 
sick  women  there  was  no  bath-room  at  all. 
The  nurse's  own  room  was  situated  at  the 
other  end  of  the  building  from  her  ward,  and 
she  had  to  go  across  the  men's  ward  to  get  to 
her  patients  at  night,  if  she  went.  There  was 
no  place  for  insane  or  refractory  patients,  or  for 
the  dying,  except  in  the  general  ward.  Some- 
times their  cries  and  groans  are  very  distressing 
to  the  other  patients.  In  a  recent  case  of  death 
from  mania,  the  whole  ward  was  disturbed  for 
several  nights. 

Most  of  the  women  are  kept  at  Rainsford 
Island,  and  there  are  many  more  reasons  for 
criticism  there  than  on  Long  Island.  The  only 
hospital  there  is  an  old  smallpox  hospital,  more 
than  three-score  years  old.  This  is  crowded 
beyond  all  thought  of  the  requirements  of  sani- 
tary science.  Think  of  a  room  for  confinement 


OUR    BROTHERS   AND    SISTERS  267 

cases  only  seven  feet  wide  and  less  than  twelve 
feet  long.  In  the  annual  report  of  Public  Insti- 
tutions for  1889  we  find  the  following  state- 
ment by  the  then  resident  physician :  "  It  is 
remarkable  that  a  building  which  was  a  small- 
pox hospital  fifty-seven  years  ago,  and  which 
since  then  has  undergone  no  material  improve- 
ment, should  up  to  the  present  time  be  the  only 
hospital  connected  with  our  pauper  institu- 
tions." The  doctor  might  have  added  that  this 
building  was  abandoned  a  quarter  of  a  century 
ago  by  the  State,  as  unfit  for  sick  persons.  It 
is  certainly  no  extravagance  to  say  that  these 
arrangements  for  the  care  of  the  sick  on  Rains- 
ford  Island  are  more  than  half  a  century  behind 
the  times.  The  only  thing  modern  I  saw  was 
the  keen-eyed  physician. 

There  is  about  the  entire  institution  a  lack  of 
careful  though tfulness  for  the  comfort  of  the  in- 
mates, that  is  exceedingly  painful  to  a  thought- 
ful observer.  For  example,  the  island  is  very 
bea-utifully  situated,  and  there  are  many  fine 
trees  in  the  shade  of  which,  with  comfortable 
arrangements,  it  would  be  a  most  healthful  and 
delightful  experience  for  hundreds  of  these 


268  WHITE   SLAVES 

infirm  and  aged  women  to  sit  on  summer  days ; 
but,  although  I  searched  carefully  throughout 
the  grounds,  I  found  only  two  benches  under 
the  trees  anywhere,  and  a  half-dozen  more, 
perhaps,  around  on  the  sea-front,  and  not  one 
of  them  with  a  back  to  it.  Think  of  arranging 
for  the  comfort  of  your  own  grandmother, 
eighty  years  old,  in  that  way ! 

The  food  here,  too,  is  insufficient.  For  in- 
stance, the  matron  told  me  that  only  those  who 
worked  were  allowed  butter  on  their  bread. 
These  old  women  are  set  down  to  bread  and 
tea  for  one  meal,  and  bread  and  soup  for  another ; 
they,  too,  have  a  little  meat  of  some  kind  three 
times  a  week,  and  potatoes  at  dinner.  Again  I 
repeat  that,  with  the  large  farm  attached  to  Long 
Island,  there  is  no  reason  why  these  old  women, 
as  well  as  the  old  men,  should  not  have  an  abun- 
dant quantity  and  an  appetizing  variety  of  veg- 
etables, as  well  as  plenty  of  nourishing  milk. 
And  I  maintain  that  it  is  a  shame  and  disgrace 
that  the  Boston  which  less  than  five  years  ago 
could  spend  more  than  twenty  thousand  dollars 
in  feasting  and  wining  a  Hawaiian  woman  who 
came  to  visit  us,  expending  four  thousand  dol- 


OUR    BROTHERS    AND    SISTERS  269 

lars  for  flowers  alone,  cannot  afford  to  furnish  a 
little  butter  to  spread  on  the  bread  of  the  help- 
less old  women  on  Rainsford  Island,  even  if  they 
are  unable  to  work.  Think  of  the  stolid  indif- 
ference, or  thoughtlessness  —  to  hunt  for  chari- 
table words  —  of  an  institution  having  several 
hundreds  of  people  to  care  for,  and  yet  making 
no  difference  in  its  hospital  diet.  No  matter 
what  the  disease,  it  is  to  eat  up  to  the  cast-iron 
programme,  or  starve.  Who  that  has  been  ill 
or  has  watched  anxiously  with  their  own  dear 
ones,  but  has  noticed  the  capriciousness  of  a 
sick  person's  appetite,  the  longing  for  little 
delicacies,  for  just  a  taste  of  some  rare  and  un- 
usual dish  or  drink?  Such  things  are  not  ex- 
pensive ;  they  only  mean  that  somebody  shall 
invest  a  little  genuine  sympathy  and  thought- 
fulness  in  the  matter.  Throughout  this  entire 
institution,  hospital  and  all,  having  over  four 
hundred  women,  there  is  not  a  single  trained 
nurse  !  In  this  day  of  enlightenment  it  ought 
to  be  a  crime  for  any  hospital  to  be  carried  on 
without  trained  nurses.  There  is  no  night 
watchman  on  the  whole  island,  and,  after  eight 
o'clock  in  the  evening,  nobody  who  is  responsi- 


270  WHITE    SLAVES 

ble  at  all.  In  the  main  institution  on  Rainsford 
Island  the  attic  is  crowded  with  beds  to  such 
an  extent  as  to  make  a  healthful  atmosphere 
impossible. 

You  must  remember  that  many  people  here 
are  paupers  through  no  fault  of  their  own. 
Many  of  them  are  victims  of  incurable  disease ; 
and,  as  against  such  cases  the  Boston  hospitals 
are  closed,  the  almshouse  is  for  them  the  only 
open  door.  Public  sentiment  must  be  aroused 
to  demand,  with  Florence  Nightingale,  that 
"  work-house  sick  shall  not  be  work -house  in- 
mates, but  they  shall  be  poor  sick,  cared  for  as 
sick  who  are  to  be  cured  if  possible,  and  treated 
as  becomes  a  Christian  country  if  they  cannot 
be  cured."  We  people  who  are  followers  of 
Him  who  confessed,  "  The  foxes  have  holes,  the 
birds  of  the  air  have  nests,  but  the  Son  of  man 
hath  not  where  to  lay  His  head,"  cannot  afford 
to  treat  people  who  are,  through  misfortune,  in 
the  same  condition  to-day  as  though  they  were 
some  species  of  criminal,  rather  than  as  the  hos- 
tages of  our  Christ.  Perhaps  you  say  these 
people  are  not  appreciative,  are  not  refined,  do 
not  have  fine  feelings  —  how  do  you  know  that? 


OUR    BROTHERS    AND   SISTERS  271 

That  is  doubtless  true  about  some  of  them,  but 
about  many  of  them  nothing  could  be  more 
false.  People  do  not  lose  their  powers  of  appre- 
ciation when  they  lose  their  money,  and  I  doubt 
not  that  these  people  would  average,  in  the  es- 
sential characteristics  of  manly  and  womanly 
character,  with  the  same  number  of  people  of 
the  same  age  you  could  gather  from  the  homes 
along  your  street.  Last  Christmas  some  kind- 
hearted  women  went  down  to  Rainsford  with 
some  gifts  for  the  sick  poor.  One  of  them,  writ- 
ing about  their  reception,  says:  "It  was  very 
touching  to  see  the  happiness  our  little  gifts 
conferred.  The  first  was  a  poor  old  woman, 
more  than  eighty,  nearly  blind  from  cataracts 
over  her  eyes.  She  is  called  c  Welsh  Ann  '  be- 
cause she  is  from  Wales.  My  friend  told  her  I 
had  been  in  Wales.  She  seemed  so  glad  to 
shake  hands  with  one  who  had  been  in  her  own 
country,  and  her  voice  choked  with  tears  as  she 
thanked  me  and  took  my  gift.  But  she  brushed 
the'  tears  away  from  her  poor  sightless  eyes 
while  my  friend  repeated  to  her  the  Twenty- 
third  Psalm,  and  then  at  her  request  knelt  and 
prayed.  The  apron  which  I  gave  her  has  quite 


272  WHITE   SLAVES 

a  history.  A  girl  who  earns  her  own  living, 
hearing  I  was  making  these  aprons,  sent  me  this 
one  which  she  bought.  It  was  worked  across 
the  bottom,  and  I  thought,  as  poor  Ann  rubbed 
her  hands  over  the  work  she  could  not  see,  but 
only  touch,  how  cheered  the  young  lady  would 
be  when  she  heard  of  the  joy  her  gift  gave.  I 
was  asked  to  give  one  pretty  apron  to  another 
Ann  —  one  they  called  '  Greenland  Ann,'  be- 
cause she  is  so  very  fond  of  hearing  them  sing 
c  From  Greenland's  icy  mountains.' r  And 
surely  that  spirit  of  the  Christ,  which  is  warm 
enough  to  impel  men  to  dare  the  frost  of 
"  Greenland's  icy  mountains  "  in  order  to  com- 
fort with  His  blessed  Gospel  their  Esquimau 
brother,  ought  to  prompt  us  to  deal  thought- 
fully and  tenderly  with  the  dear  old  soul  that 
likes  to  hear  Him  sung  about  on  Rainsford 
Island. 

I  shall  never  forget  the  impression  made 
upon  me  by  Mark  Guy  Pearse,  one  of  the 
greatest  of  the  English  preachers,  in  his  story 
of  how  he  was  ordained  a  preacher.  He  said : 
"  It  was  no  bishop  or  presbytery  that  consecrated 
me,  but  a  saintly  Cornish  woman,  whom  we 


OUR   BROTHERS    AND    SISTERS  273 

children  called  old  Rosie,  and  who  was,  indeed, 
my  right  reverend  mother  in  God. 

"  So  far  as  I  can  recollect,  it  was  always  sun- 
shiny when  we  visited  old  Rosie,  though  of 
course  it  must  have  rained  sometimes.  She 
had  a  single  room  in  a  tiny  little  cottage 
squeezed  behind  the  rest.  A  narrow  strip  led 
to  the  door,  and  there  w^as  no  room  for  any 
window  in  front,  except  the  one  right  above 
the  door,  peering  out  from  under  the  heavy 
thatch.  There  is  no  one  to  answer  if  we  knock, 
so  we  push  our  fingers  through  the  door  and 
lift  the  wooden  latch.  My  father,  who  goes 
with  us  almost  every  Sunday,  has  to  stoop  his 
head  in  climbing  the  narrow  stair,  and  of 
course  the  little  lad  of  six  and  his  sisters  stoop 
their  heads  too ;  there  are  four  of  the  girls  and 
one  of  me.  Rosie  welcomes  us  with  her  beam- 
ing smile.  She  is  sitting  up  in  bed,  as  she  has 
done  for  eleven  long  years.  She  is  a  hundred 
and  five  years  old,  and  her  hair  is  snowy  white, 
yet  there  is  not  a  wrinkle  on  her  brow,  and  her 
cheeks  have  the  rosy  brightness  from  which 
she  gets  the  familiar  name.  All  her  relations 
are  gone,  and  she  is  now  a  pauper  with  only 


274  WHITE    SLAVES 

two  or  three  shillings  a  week  from  the 
parish. 

"  We  might  call  her  poor  and  lonely  and 
bedridden,  yet  she  is  brimful  of  happiness. 
The  Bible  is  constantly  at  her  hand,  and  she 
is  generally  thanking  God  for  all  His  mercies. 
She  has  lived  in  the  light  and  love  of  the  Sav- 
iour since  she  was  eleven  years  old ;  and  she 
has  gone  so  long  and  so  far  in  the  good  way, 
that  now  it  is  as  if  she  were  sitting  just 
outside  the  golden  gates,  crowned  with  radiant 
beauty  and  clothed  with  white  raiment,  wraiting 
until  her  Lord  shall  bid  her  enter. 

"At  dear  old  Rosie's  bed  we  used  to  have  a 
little  service ;  first  a  chapter  read  from  the 
Bible,  then  a  hymn  —  '  Rock  of  Ages  '  was  her 
favorite,  sung  to  'Rousseau's  Dream.'  When 
the  prayer  was  over,  old  Rosie  would  lay  her 
thin  hand  on  the  little  lad's  curly  head,  and 
say  as  she  turned  her  face  upward,  '  O  Lord, 
bless  the  little  lad !  Bless  him  and  make  him 
a  preacher.'  I  didn't  like  that  prayer  of  hers, 
and  I  used  to  say  to  myself,  c  I  will  never  be  a 
preacher;  I  will  be  a  doctor,  and  gallop  about 
the  country  visiting  people.'  But  one  Sunday, 


OUR   BROTHERS    AND    SISTERS  275 

after  the  service  and  her  little  prayer,  she  said 
'  good-by  '  to  us  all.  '  You  won't  see  me  any 
more ;  so  it  must  be  good-by  for  a  long  time 
now,  until  we  meet  at  home.'  We  wondered 
what  she  meant.  Two  days  after,  she  was  car- 
ried home  by  God's  angels  from  her  lonely 
room.  My  little  heart  was  like  to  break  at  the 
thought  of  never  seeing  her  again ;  and  I  went 
out  by  myself  to  the  garden  and  prayed,  4  Please 
God,  I  don't  care  so  much,  after  all,  if  I  be- 
come a  preacher,  if  it  will  make  dear  Rosie  any 
happier.' '! 

It  would  be  better  for  us  that  a  millstone 
were  hanged  about  our  necks,  and  we  were  cast 
into  the  depths  of  the  sea,  than  that  we  should 
be  thoughtless  or  indifferent  of  one  of  God's 
poor,  like  old  Rosie. 

Well,  you  ask,  how  can  it  be  made  better? 
My  answer  is  that  there  ought  to  be  a  radical 
change  in.  the  Board  of  Control  of  Public  Insti- 
tutions. I  do  not  make  any  personal  fight  on 
the  three  men  now  in  control.  I  make  war  on 
the  whole  system.  As  it  is  now,  there  are,  in 
and  about  Boston,  ten  public  institutions,  occu- 
pied by  thousands  of  men  and  women  and 


276  WHITE   SLAVES 

children,  carried  on  at  an  expense  of  nearly  six 
hundred  thousand  dollars,  entirely  under  the 
control  of  three  commissioners.  This  is  not 
wise.  There  ought  to  be  a  large  advisory  board 
made  up  of  distinguished  citizens.  This  should 
be  composed  of  women  as  well  as  men.  It  is 
certainly  a  very  short-sighted  and  thoughtless 
arrangement  that,  although  there  are  in  these 
institutions  several  hundred  women  and  chil- 
dren, there  is  no  woman  who  has  any  authorized 
interest  in  them.  There  is  every  reason  why 
women  should  be  on  the  Boards  of  Control  of 
Public  Institutions.  The  editor  of  the  New 
York  Nation  says :  "  Whatever  improvement 
there  has  been  in  the  condition  of  Bellevue 
Hospital,  for  example,  and  of  the  hospitals 
of  Blackwell's  and  Hart's  Islands,  during  the 
past  twenty  years  —  and  it  is  very  great  —  has, 
as  a  rule,  been  due  to  women's  initiative  and 
labors." 

The  fact  is,  that  everything  that  concerns 
health,  education,  and  good  morals  occupies  the 
minds  of  women  more  than  it  does  the  minds 
of  most  of  their  husbands  and  fathers ;  and  in 
every  department  of  municipal  administration, 


: 


OUR   BROTHERS   AND    SISTERS  277 

where  the  conditions  of  the  streets,  of  the 
sewers,  of  the  hospitals  and  almshouses,  and  of 
the  police,  are  in  question,  women  have  an 
equal  interest  with  men,  and  in  order  to  the 
public  well-being  and  safety,  ought  to  have  an 
equal  voice.  I  am  sure  that  an  advisory  board 
of  leading  citizens,  on  which  were  three  or  four 
level-headed,  humane  women,  would  work  the 
revolution  that  is  needed  in  the  treatment  of 
Boston's  paupers.  Do  not  put  this  question 
aside.  This  is  Boston's  question,  and  you  are 
a  part  of  Boston.  As  some  one  sang  in  the 
Boston  Transcript  not  long  ago :  — 


Lazarus  lies  at  your  gate! 

O  proud  and  prosperous  city, 
How  long  will  you  let  him  wait? 

Listen  and  look;  have  pity. 

Dives,  oh,  cannot  you  hear, 

For  the  music  and  dance  of  your  high  land, 
The  moaning  of  misery  drear 

That  comes  from  the  desolate  island? 

Finest  of  linen  you  wear; 

Comrades  in  luxury  you  cherish, 
Sumptuous  daily  you  fare. 

What  of  your  neighbors  who  perish? 


278  WHITE   SLAVES 

When  you  would  heighten  your  cheer 
By  a  contrast  that's  very  dramatic, 

Fancy  what  scenes  may  appear 
In  a  certain  dim  hospital  attic. 

Swarming  and  sweltering,  and  scant 
Of  air,  — foul  to  soul  as  to  senses,  — 

Where  he  that  is  guilty  of  Want 
Meets  a  doom  fit  for  graver  offences. 

Worn-out,  the  pauper  nurse  sleeps ; 

The  sufferer,  forsaken,  is  crying 
With  no  one  to  moisten  his  lips,  — 

No  one  to  mark  that  he's  dying. 

Who  should  hear  the  catch  in  his  breath 
'Mid  the  coughs,  curses,  ravings,  resounding 

Through  the  ward  o'er  the  bed  of  his  death, 
From  the  close-crowded  pallets  surrounding  ? 

And  picture  the  scenes,  to  come 

Perhaps,  of  another  sorrow 
Nearer  your  stately  home, — 

That  you  will  not  have  to  borrow; 

When  hushed  is  all  merry  din, 
And  your  smiling  guests  have  vanished; 

When  your  flowers  come  blooming  in, 
To  be  glanced  at  once  and  banished ; 

When  vain  are  all  the  crafts 
That  Mammon  serve,  and  never 

Your  costliest,  coolest  draughts 
Can  quench  the  fire  of  your  fever; 


OUR   BROTHERS   AND   SISTERS  279 

When  your  street  is  red  with  tan, 
And  your  oft-pulled  door-bell  muffled, 

That  the  peace  of  a  dying  man 
By  no  faintest  sound  be  ruffled; 

When  love,  to  give  you  rest, 

Doth  toil  with  soothings  fruitless; 
And  skill  has  done  its  best, 

And  the  town's  best  skill  is  bootless; 

When  the  chaises  leave  the  place, 

And  the  helpless,  poor  patrician 
Lies  looking  up  in  the  face 

Of  only  the  Great  Physician,  — 

God  grant  it  with  joy  may  be 

That  you  hear,  '  What  you  did  toward  others 
Ye  have  done  it  unto  Me, 

In  the  least  of  those  My  brothers ! ' 

Lazarus  lies  at  your  gate; 

Our  kindly  dear  old  city, 
Let  him  no  longer  wait; 

Open  the  doors  of  your  pity!  " 


XI 


COMMENT   ON  "OUR   BROTHERS   AND 
SISTERS,  THE  BOSTON   PAUPERS" 


"  There  is  no  caste  in  blood, 
Which  runneth  of  one  hue,  nor  caste  in  tears, 
Which  trickled  salt  with  all." 


XI 

COMMENT   ON   "OUR  BROTHERS   AND 
SISTERS,   THE   BOSTON   PAUPERS" 

MRS.  ALICE  N.  LINCOLN,  who  has  given 
a  large  amount  of  time  and  painstaking 
interest  to  the  treatment  of  the  paupers,  and 
who  deserves  more  credit  than  any  one  else  for 
the  present  hopeful  campaign  in  their  behalf, 
writes  as  follows  in  the  Boston  Transcript  of 
August  28 :  - 

"  Those  of  your  readers  who  were  kind 
enough  to  follow  in  your  columns,  last  winter, 
the  articles  for  which  you  courteously  made 
space  there  concerning  the  poor  of  Boston,  will, 
I  think,  be  interested  to  know  what  has  since 
been  done  for  the  islands,  and  why  so  much 
controversy  is  aroused  by  the  sermon  of  Dr. 
Banks  on  the  paupers. 

"  Early  in  the  spring  two  new  commissioners 
were  appointed.  It  was  hoped  that  this  change 
283 


284 


WHITE    SLAVES 


in  the  board  would  bring  about  good  results, 
but,  in  point  of  fact,  matters  remained  much 
the  same.  The  appropriation  for  a  new  hospital, 
though  made  months  ago,  was  not  acted  upon 
until  this  week,  when  bids  for  the  building 
\vere  opened. 


WOMEN'S  HOSPITAL  WARD  AT  LONG  ISLAND.I 

"  On  August  5  I  had  the  honor  to  lay  before 
the  commissioners  eight  requests  on  behalf  of 
the  inmates  of  the  island,  as  follows  :  — 

"  1.    More  occupation  for  the  able-bodied. 

"  2.  More  comfortable  chairs  for  the  aged 
women,  who  are  obliged  to  rise  at  5.30  A.M.,  and 

1  This  is  the  best  hospital  ward  on  the  two  islands.  Screen  shown 
on  the  right,  behind  which  is  a  dying  woman. 


COMMENT  285 

are  not  allowed  to  lie  down  without  permis- 
sion. 

"  3.  More  benches  out  of  doors  for  the  benefit 
of  the  inmates. 

"  4.  A  separate  room  for  the  dying  (it  having 
been  urged  by  both  the  physician  and  superin- 
tendent that  the  cries  of  dying  patients  often 
disturbed  a  whole  ward  for  several  nights). 

"  5.  More  privacy  for  women  in  bathing  (and 
it  will,  perhaps,  shock  your  readers,  as  it  did  the 
writer,  that  one  of  the  commissioners  affirmed 
and  repeated  that  he  did  not  consider  this 
necessary). 

"  6.  Another  nurse  at  Long  Island,  where  Miss 
O'Brian  has  charge  of  fifty-two  sick  women  and 
where  there  is  no  bath-room. 

"  7.  Another  nurse  at  the  Main  Institution 
Building  on  Rainsford  Island,  where  the 
laundry-matron  has  charge  of  forty-two  sick 
women  in  addition  to  her  other  duties,  and 
with  no  assistance  except  what  is  given  her  by 
inmates. 

"  8.  A  new  matron  for  the  hospital.  My 
reason  for  making  this  last  request  is  that  I 
believe  the  present  matron  to  be  inefficient. 


286  WHITE   SLAVES 

She  has  had  no  previous  hospital  training  to  fit 
her  for  her  duties,  and  certainly  the  hospital 
and  its  patients,  when  I  last  saw  them,  bore 
evidences  of  neglect.  The  beds  were  not  clean, 
and  the  patients  showed  a  lack  of  personal 
cleanliness  and  care.  When  I  first  visited  the 
hospital  the  floors  were  dirty  and  the  closets 
were  unwashed,  but  there  has  been  an  improve- 
ment in  those  respects.  I  was  present  when 
dinner  was  served  to  thirty  patients  in  one  ward 

—  or,  indeed,  to  seventy  inmates  of  the  hospital 

—  and  the  matron  took  no  charge  of  the  food, 
which  was  put  before  the  patients  in  a  most 
uninviting   manner  —  a   great   contrast   to   the 
neat  wooden  trays  which  are  in  use  at  Tewks- 
bury.     Moreover,  I  discerned  a  want  of  interest 
in  the  patients,  to  which  the  matron  herself  bore 
testimony  when  she  said  that  she  never  washed 
a  wound,  and  was  engaged  as  a  matron  —  not  as 
a  nurse. 

"  These,  then,  were  the  grounds  upon  which 
I  asked  for  the  appointment  of  another  nurse  or 
matron,  and  fortunately  one  has  applied  for  the 
position  entirely  without  my  knowledge  or 
solicitation.  One  of  the  commissioners  doubted 


COMMENT  287 

whether  a  trained  hospital  emergency  nurse 
could  be  found  to  go  to  the  islands ;  but  this 
offer  seems  to  set  that  question  at  rest,  and  it  is 
to  be  hoped  her  application  may  be  considered 
favorably. 

"  I  also  had  the  honor  to  lay  before  the  com- 
missioners the  report  of  one  of  my  former 
tenants,  who  was  an  inmate  of  Rainsford  Island 
a  little  more  than  a  year  ago. 

"  She  was  a  young  woman  who  went  down 
there  because  of  a  lump  in  her  breast,  taking 
her  baby  with  her.  But  for  the  baby  she  would 
have  been  admitted  to  the  City  Hospital ;  but 
she  did  not  like  to  leave  her  child,  and  her 
husband,  who  was  absent,  was  unable  to  care 
for  it.  Consequently,  she  became  for  the  time 
an  inmate  of  the  Rainsford  Island  Hospital. 

"  She  complained  first  of  the  indignity  of 
having  to  strip  in  the  presence  of  others,  no 
screen  or  curtain  being  provided  as  a  shelter 
to  the  necessary  bath,  which  is  the  first  step  on 
entrance  to  an  institution. 

"  During  her  stay  of  three  weeks  she  had  no 
towel  given  to  her,  and  only  one  clean  sheet  was 
furnished. 


288  WHITE   SLAVES 

"  She  was  expected  to  cook  all  the  food  for  her 
baby,  and  to  make  and  clean  her  own  bed, 
although  she  was  partly  incapacitated  by  the 
lump  in  her  breast,  which  affected  one  arm. 

"  The  food  was  very  poor  and  unsatisfactory  ; 
and  when  she  complained  that  the  porridge  was 
sour,  the  matron  told  her  if  she  did  not  like  it 
she  could  leave  it. 

"  Worse  than  all,  her  baby  fell  ill  on  a  Wednes- 
day ;  she  could  obtain  no  medicine  for  it  until 
Sunday  (though  she  asked  for  it  repeatedly), 
and  on  Monday  the  baby  died. 

"  The  mother  left  the  institution  the  next  day. 
She  speaks  in  the  highest  terms  of  the  physician 
in  charge  and  of  the  assistant,  Miss  McDonald, 
at  Rainsford  Island ;  but  she  says  the  matron 
never  did  anything  for  her  and  was  not  with  her 
when  the  baby  died;  also,  that  the  milk  and 
other  food  ordered  for  the  patients  is  often  not 
received  by  them.  And  in  this  respect  her 
statement  is  corroborated  by  the  remarks  of 
another  woman,  also  my  tenant,  who  was  an 
inmate  of  Long  Island  when  it  was  first  opened 
for  women  several  years  ago.  This  woman  told 
me,  with  bated  breath,  that  the  food  was 


COMMENT 


289 


miserable  —  it  was  killing  her ;  and,  indeed,  she 
died  soon  after,  though  I  think  grief  hastened 
her  end. 


GETTING  A  BiiEATH  OF   FiiJtiSH  Alii. 

"It  is  because  I  have  seen  these  people  in  their 
own  homes  that  I  feel  such  sympathy  for  them 


290  WHITE   SLAVES 

as  paupers.  They  have  known  the  comfort  and 
independence  of  their  own  surroundings,  and  if 
by  reason  of  old  age  or  sickness  —  through  no 
fault  of  their  own  —  they  become  paupers,  they 
should  at  least  be  treated  with  due  consideration 
and  nursed  with  all  tenderness.  I  am  entering 
no  plea  for  the  lazy  and  idle  and  intemperate 
class  who  seek  the  refuge  of  an  almshouse,  and 
for  whom,  as  Dr.  Banks  says,  the  work-house  is 
the  proper  place  ;  but  I  do  say  that  old  or  sick 
people,  even  if  paupers,  are  entitled  to  the  very 
best  care.  We  do  not  begrudge  it  to  them  in 
our  City  Hospital  or  our  State  almshouse ; 
therefore,  why  is  it  too  much  to  require  it  of 
the  city  of  Boston's  pauper  hospitals? 

"  No  wonder  that  an  attack  such  as  has  been 
made  by  Dr.  Banks  meets  with  violent  opposi- 
tion and  denial.  He  is  attacking  institutions 
whose  officials  depend  for  their  bread  and  butter 
on  the  positions  which  they  fill.  But  Dr.  Banks 
and  I  have  no  '  axe  to  grind,'  and  he  is  only 
stating  the  truth  when  he  says  that  the  pauper 
institutions  at  Rainsford  Island  are  overcrowded 
(so  overcrowded  that  nearly  fifty  old  women 
sleep  in  a  close  and  stifling  attic,  under  the 


COMMENT  291 

roof),  and  that  the  fare,  especially  for  the  old 
and  sick,  is  not  what  it  should  be." 

The  Boston  Herald  of  August  30  begins  an 
exhaustive  article,  more  than  five  columns  long, 
by  saying :  — 

"For  some  time  there  has  been  an  earnest 
and  vigorous  agitation  going  on  regarding  the 
management  and  condition  of  Boston's  pauper 
institutions  at  Long  and  Rainsford  Islands. 
Heretofore  this  agitation  has  been  out  of  the 
sight  of  the  general  public,  with  the  exception 
of  a  few  letters  which  have  appeared  from  time 
to  time  in  the  papers ;  consequently,  the  sermon 
of  Rev.  Louis  Albert  Banks  last  Sunday  on 
the  subject  came  like  a  revelation  to  many. 

"  The  Herald  had  been  making  a  thorough  in- 
vestigation of  the  charges  brought,  previous  to 
Mr.  Banks'  utterances,  and  this  has  been  con- 
tinued up  to  the  present  time,  in  order  that  the 
people  of  Boston  may  know  accurately  and  to 
the  fullest  the  precise  condition  of  its  pauper 
institutions  and  their  inmates.  As  a  result  of 
that  investigation,  it  may  be  boldly  said  that 
the  criticisms  which  have  been  made  public  do 
not  give  an  adequate  idea  of  the  disgraceful 


292  WHITE   SLAVES 

condition  in  which  the  institutions  are  at  pres- 
ent, nor  the  treatment  which  the  paupers 
receive  and  under  which  they  exist  rather  than 
live. 

"  This  statement  is  a  strong  one,  but  it  can  be 
borne  out  by  facts  which  are  indisputable." 

In  the  course  of  this  long  article,  which 
fully  sustains  all  statements  set  forth  in  my 
discourse,  the  Herald  reporter,  commenting  on 
the  crowded  condition  of  the  buildings  on 
Rainsford  Island,  says  :  — 

"  It  is  in  the  main  building  at  Rainsford  that 
the  greatest  lack  of  even  decent  surroundings 
prevails,  and  where  the  condition  of  the  in- 
mates is  the  worst.  Here  the  fault  seems  to  lie 
not  only  with  the  commissioners,  but  with'  the 
matrons  in  charge,  for  there  is  no  system  dis- 
cernible in  the  housekeeping  arrangements 
whatever.  The  infirmary  is  occupied  by  those 
women  who  are  not  able  to  get  about ;  and  the 
rooms  composing  that  part  of  the  building  are 
pleasant  and  airy  of  themselves,  but  they  are 
spoiled  by  their  keeping.  There  is  no  classifi- 
cation of  inmates,  and  old  and  young  are  all 
together,  as  well  as  the  vicious  and  the  unfortu- 
nate. 


COMMENT  293 

"Another  classification  which  might  be  made 
was  suggested  by  the  presence  of  two  women 
who  were  so  unfortunate  as  to  be  afflicted  in 
such  a  manner  that  the  whole  air  of  the  room 
was  contaminated  on  their  account.  This  was 
through  no  fault  of  their  own,  and  they  should 
not  be  made  to  suffer  for  it ;  but  it  seems  hardly 
fair  that  all  the  other  women  should  be  com- 
pelled to  breathe  the  air  made  foul  by  their 
presence.  Add  to  this  detriment  to  health  and 
decent  living  the  bad  sanitary  arrangements, 
and  the  result  is,  indeed,  open  to  criticism. 

"  This  building  is  so  old  and  antiquated  that 
it  originally  had  no  place  provided  inside  for 
water-closets  and  bath-rooms.  In  putting  these 
in  they  were  built  directly  in  the  corners  of  the 
rooms ;  and  these  corners  were  then  partitioned 
off,  but  for  some  unknown  reason  the  partitions 
were  not  continued  up  to  the  ceilings,  the 
result  being  that  the  closets  were  practically 
left  in  the  room  and  a  screen  put  around. 
Owing  to  the  fact  that  there  is  no  water  on  the 
island,  it  all  being  brought  in  tanks  by  steamer, 
there  is  not  that  abundance  used  in  flushing  out 
the  bowls  which  otherwise  might  be  the  case, 


294  WHITE    SLAVES 

and  which  would  go  so  far  toward  removing  the 
horrible  odor  which  is  so  prevalent  in  every 
part  of  the  building.  Aside  from  the  discom- 
fort in  being  obliged  to  smell  this  odor  continu- 
ally, the  danger  to  the  health  of  the  inmates  is 
a  serious  thing. 

"  Throughout  the  wards  in  this  building  there 
is  considerable  overcrowding,  although  not  to 
the  extent  that  is  to  be  seen  in  another  part. 
The  beds  are  all  cared  for  by  the  women  them- 
selves, and  conversation  with  the  matron  showed 
that  there  was  a  regular  time  for  changing  the 
bed  linen,  although  that  time  was  not  the  same 
in  any  two  rooms,  and  the  writer,  after  contin- 
ued questioning  and  asking  for  explanation, 
failed  to  discover  that  there  was  any  regularity 
whatever  about  it. 

"  A  few  beds  were  taken  at  random  and 
stripped  to  see  their  condition.  Invariably  the 
sheets  were  dirty,  very  dirty ;  but  this  was  ex- 
plained by  one  of  the  inmates  who  was  in 
charge  of  this  ward  by  the  statement  that  it 
was  time  they  were  changed,  according  to  their 
usual  practice,  but  for  some  reason,  not  given, 
it  had  not  been  done  this  week.  On  nearly  all 


COMMENT 


295 


the  sheets  were  plainly  seen  the  marks  of  dead 
bed-bugs  and  other  vermin,  some  of  it  dried  on 
and  looking  as  though  it  had  been  there  for  a 
long  time. 

"  It  is  in  the  attic  of  the  main  building,  how- 


ATTIC   AT   RAINSFOKD   ISLAND.. 

ever,  that  one  should  go  to  realize  some  of 
Dickens'  pictures  of  pauper  life,  for  there  is 
a  picture  here  that  needs  no  exaggeration  to 
make  it  appear  on  a  par  with  those  in  fiction. 

1  Cut  shows  one  wing.  Another  crosses  it  at  right  angles  and  is 
partly  occupied.  Thirty  women  occupy  this  room,  allowing  about 
320  cubic  feet  of  air-space  per  person.  The  only  ventilation  is  through 
windows  jutting  out  on  the  roof,  each  one  being  2  feet  10  inches  by 
4  feet  8  inches  in  size. 


296  WHITE   SLAVES 

In  this  attic  live  the  older  women,  and  they 
pass  their  sleeping  hours  and  many  of  their 
waking  ones  under  the  eaves  of  this  old  house. 

"  Throughout  this  attic  the  peak  is  so  low  that 
it  can  be  touched  by  the  hand  of  a  man  of  ordi- 
nary height  while  standing,  and  the  roof  pitches 
until  it  comes  to  within  two  feet  of  the  floor. 
Under  the  eaves  here  are  placed  the  beds  of 
these  old  women,  their  heads  close  under  the 
roof,  and  extending  in  a  line  down  the  length 
of  the  building. 

"  The  width  of  this  attic  is  eighteen  feet,  and 
its  length  is  that  of  the  building ;  but  it  is 
divided  up  into  several  apartments.  In  one  of 
these  apartments  were  thirty  beds,  all  occupied 
at  night.  The  total  air-space  of  this  room 
allowed  about  three  hundred  and  twenty  cubic 
feet  to  each  person,  where  a  thousand  are  consid- 
ered necessary  with  good  ventilation,  according 
to  Mr.  Commissioner  Newell.  The  only  light 
and  ventilation  that  this  attic  gets  is  through  a 
few  small  windows  let  into  the  roof,  not  large 
enough  to  furnish  ventilation  for  rooms  which 
are  not  overcrowded,  and  certainly  not  large 
enough  to  purify  rooms  where  the  air  is  made 


COMMENT  297 

foul  by  being  breathed  by  at  least  three  times 
too  many  persons. 

"Moreover,  these  old  women  are  required  to 
rise  every  morning  at  5.30  o'clock,  and  are  com- 
pelled to  remain  up  until  8  o'clock  in  the  even- 
ing. They  are  not  allowed  to  lie  down  during 
the  day  without  a  special  permit  from  the  doc- 
tor, as,  they  say,  it  would  cause  disorder.  This 
permit  he  says  he  is  always  willing  to  grant, 
but  they  seldom  come  for  it.  This  seems  per- 
fectly natural,  as  one  hardly  can  expect  that  the 
old  women  would  take  pains  to  hunt  up  the 
doctor  every  time  they  wanted  to  take  a  short 
nap. 

"  Not  only  are  they  not  allowed  to  lie  down  for 
a  nap  without  this  special  permit,  but  comfort- 
able chairs  are  not  furnished  them.  By  each 
bed  is  a  single  ordinary  wooden  chair  of  the 
cheapest  kind,  and  this  is  allotted  to  the  one 
occupying  the  bed.  Now  and  then  a  docking- 
chair  may  be  seen,  but  they  are  few  and  far 
between. 

"  Some  time  ago  a  benevolent  and  kind- 
hearted  lady  visiting  the  island  was  struck  with 
this  lack  of  comfort,  and  sent  to  the  institution 


298 


WHITE    SLAVES 


a  number  of  rocking-chairs  for  use  in  the  old 
women's  ward.  They  arrived  on  July  16,  but 
an  active  search  for  them  failed  to  disclose  their 
whereabouts.  It  was  plain  that  the  women  for 


MAKINlfiKS     HOME. 


whom  they  were  intended  were  not  getting  the 
benefit  of  them,  and  inquiry  was  made.  No- 
body seemed  to  know  where  they  were.  Sev- 
eral believed  that  something  of  the  kind  had 
been  sent  down,  but  knew  nothing  more, 


COMMENT  299 

Finally,  after  an  energetic  search  by  Dr.  Har- 
kins,  the  chairs  were  discovered  in  a  store- 
house, or  paint-shop,  where  they  had  been  put 
when  they  landed  on  the  wharf  so.  long  ago. 
Two  days  later  these  chairs  had  been  taken  out 
and  placed  in  the  wards,  and  there  were  two 
hundred  women  eager  for  the  six  comfortable 
rockers. 

"  Another  criticism  which  might  be  made  is 
that  the  paupers  are  provided  with  no  regular 
religious  service.  At  Deer  Island  there  is  a 
paid  chaplain,  and  although  his  duties  do  not 
call  him  to  the  almshouse,  he  sometimes  goes 
over.  There  is  a  large  room  called  the  chapel, 
and  here  religious  services  are  held  when  there 
is  any  one  to  lead  them.  A  Catholic  priest 
goes  down  twice  a  week  to  minister  to  the 
wants  of  the  Catholics,  who  are  in  the  majority ; 
something  like  ninety-five  per  cent  being  of 
that  persuasion.  The  fact  remains,  however, 
that  the  city  of  Boston  does  not  give  its  pau- 
pers the  benefit  of  any  religious  service  or  guid- 
ance. As  was  said  by  one  lady  on  hearing  the 
facts :  '  In  the  eyes  of  the  city  it  is  a  greater 
crime  to  be  a  pauper  than  a  criminal.' v 


300  WHITE    SLAVES 

Rev.  Dr.  Frederick  B.  Allen,  of  the  Episcopal 
City  Mission  of  Boston,  writing  in  the  Herald 
of  August  31,  says  :  — 

"  In  the  management  of  human  beings,  espe- 
cially the  aged,  the  infirm,  the  insane,  and  the 
sick,  there  is  needed  a  wise  and  tender  consid- 
eration which  sheer  business  management  is  apt 
to  miss. 

"  The  sociological  problems  of  pauperism  and 
crime,  the  study  of  successful  methods  in  other 
cities  and  other  lands,  the  deep  sense  of  the 
sacredness  of  our  humanity,  even  in  its  weakest 
and  most  unfortunate  members,  —  these  make 
their  demand  for  the  aid  of  men  and  women  to 
whom  these  questions  of  human  life  and  death 
are  at  least  as  controlling  as  the  reduction  of 
the  city  tax  rate. 

"  Were  there  any  such  board  of  advisers  to 
do  in  our  city  institutions  what  the  State  Chari- 
ties Aid  Society  has  done  for  New  York  State, 
we  should  not  have  been  confronted,  as  we  now 
are,  with  poorly  planned,  inadequate,  and  badly 
managed  buildings,  lack  of  discrimination  in 
those  permitted  to  occupy  them,  insufficient 
and  untrained  nurses  for  the  sick,  lack  of 


COMMENT  301 

proper  ventilation  and  food,  and  everywhere 
the  absence  of  devoted  personal,  human,  moral 
oversight  and  control. 

"I  second  most  positively  Dr.  Banks'  asser- 
tion that  '  an  advisory  board  of  leading  citizens, 
on  which  are  three  or  four  level-headed  and 
humane  women,  would  work  the  revolution 
that  is  needed  in  the  treatment  of  "  our  broth- 
ers and  sisters,  the  Boston  paupers."  : 


OF  TH£ 

UNIVERSITY 

OF 


XII 
THE  GOLD  GOD  OF  MODERN  SOCIETY 


"  When  wealth  no  mere  shall  rest  in  mounded  heaps, 
But  sinit  with  freer  light  shall  slowly  melt 
In  many  streams  to  fatten  lower  lands, 
And  light  shall  spread,  and  man  be  liker  man 
Thro'  all  the  seasons  of  the  golden  year." 


XII 
THE  GOLD  GOD  OF  MODERN  SOCIETY 

NO  one  who  is  in  touch  with  the  throbbing 
life'  of  this  time  can  fail  to  perceive  that 
this  is  an  age  peculiarly  given  up  to  the  wor- 
ship of  Mammon.  The  literature  of  our  day 
bears  certain  evidence  of  this  fact.  Scribner's 
Magazine  of  last  year  contained,  under  the  title 
of  "Jerry,"  a  painfully  realistic  and  comprehen- 
sive story,  dealing  with  the  debauch  of  a  noble 
character  by  the  fascination  of  gold.  Jerry 
belonged  to  the  "-poor  white  trash"  of  the 
Cumberland  Mountains,  and  on  the  death  of  his 
mother,  being  cruelly  treated  at  home,  he  ran 
away  to  the  West.  After  many  wanderings, 
the  little  wayfarer,  tired  out  and  almost  dead, 
fell  into  the  hands  of  a  quaint  old  miner  who 
was  digging  and  hoarding  up  gold  in  his  cabin 
in  the  Northwestern  Mountains.  In  the  midst 
of  this  wild  region,  educated  by  a  kind-hearted 
305 


306  WHITE    SLAVES 

physician,  Jerry  grew  up  to  be  a  young  man 
of  peculiarly  noble  and  heroic  character.  He 
remembered  with  painful  distinctness  that  he 
belonged  to  the  poorest  of  the  common  people, 
and  the  ambition  of  his  life  was  to  uplift  his 
own  class. 

The  fearful  tragedy  of  the  story  begins  when 
the  miserly  old  miner  —  who,  all  the  time  un- 
known to  Jerry,  is  hoarding  up  gold  for  his 
young  ward  —  discovers,  to  his  great  astonish- 
ment, that  gold  has  no  fascination  for  this 
strange  young  man,  and  fears  that  with  his 
lofty  ideals  all  his  toil  for  him  will  be  in  vain 
and  unappreciated.  So  the  shrewd  old  man 
plans  to  send  him  to  the  East,  where  his  eyes 
may  be  dazzled  with  the  brilliancy  of  fashion- 
able life,  and  where  may  be  revealed  to  him  the 
power  gold  gives  to  its  possessor.  Sitting  in 
his  old  log  cabin  on  the  mountain  side,  the  old 
miner  would  rub  his  hands  back  on  his  stubbly 
gray  hair  and  reason  with  himself :  "  If  Jerry 
only  knew  gold;  if  Jerry  could  only  see  what 
gold  could  get,  could  only  spend  gold ;  then  he 
would  be  willing  to  take  all  he  could  get  and 
never  ask  where  it  came  from."  So  the  old 


THE   GOLD    GOD   OF   MODERN    SOCIETY      307 

miner  determined  that  "Jerry  must  learn  to 
spend  money,  must  learn  to  love  it,  and  then 
all  will  go  well."  And  then  the  story  goes  on 
to  tell  of  the  deterioration  of  this  noble  young 
soul  —  how  that  gradually  he  becomes  domi- 
nated with  the  passion  for  gold,  until  he  is  not 
only  willing  to  work  for  it,  but  murder  for  it, 
if  only  he  may  have  gold  and  the  power  that  it 
brings. 

In  another  field  Mr.  Charles  Dudley  Warner 
gives  us  the  same  warning,  in  his  story  of 
"  A  Little  Journey  in  the  World."  In  this  Mr. 
Warner  tells  us  of  one  of  the  sweetest  and 
purest  of  young  women,  who  has  the  highest 
ideals,  and  whose  standards  of  morality  are  of 
the  noblest,  who  is  married  to  an  unprincipled 
young  speculator  on  Wall  Street,  New  York; 
and  under  the  influence  of  her  husband,  and 
the  society  into  which  she  is  drawn  by  his  busi- 
ness relations,  in  which  he  gathers  millions  of 
money,  all  her  holy  and  lofty  ideals  are  over- 
thrown, and  she  becomes  simply  a  material, 
worldly  woman.  This  is  the  way  he  reasons 
about  it :  "  But  we,  I  say,  who  loved  her,  and 
knew  so  well  the  noble  possibilities  of  her  royal 


308  WHITE   SLAVES 

nature,  under  circumstances  favorable  to  its 
development,  felt  more  and  more  her  departure 
from  her  own  ideals.  Her  life  in  its  spreading 
prosperity  seemed  more  and  more  shallow.  I 
do  not  say  she  was  heartless ;  T  do  not  say  she 
was  uncharitable ;  I  do  not  say  that  in  all  the 
externals  of  worldly  and  religious  observance 
she  was  wanting ;  I  do  not  say  that  the  more 
she  was  assimilated  to  the  serenely  worldly 
nature  of  her  husband,  she  did  not  love  him,  or 
that  she  was  unlovely  in  the  worldliness  that 
ingulfed  her  and  bore  her  onward.  I  do  not 
know  that  there  is  anything  singular  in  her 
history.  But  the  pain  of  it  to  us  was  in  the 
certainty  —  and  it  seemed  so  near  —  that  in 
the  decay  of  her  higher  life,  in  the  hardening 
process  of  a  material  existence,  in  the  transfer 
of  all  her  interest  to  the  trivial  and  sensuous 
gratifications  —  time,  mind,  heart,  ambition,  all 
fixed  on  them  —  we  should  never  regain  our 
Margaret.  What  I  saw  in  a  vision  of  her 
future  was  a  dead  soul  —  a  beautiful  woman  in 
all  the  success  of  envied  prosperity,  with  a. 
dead  soul." 

If    we  turn  away  from  these  revelations  of 


THE   GOLD   GOD   OF   MODERN    SOCIETY      309 

the  worm  at  the  heart  of  our  social  life,  that  are 
made  fascinating  by  the  art  in  which  they  are 
clothed,  to  the  rude  happenings  of  every-day 
observation,  the  same  danger  is  everywhere 


CHILDREN  PLAYING  IN  COPP'S  HILL  BURYING  GROUND. 

apparent.  The  associated  press  despatches  from 
San  Jose,  Cal.,  a  few  weeks  since,  bore  this 
burden  :  "  One  of  the  best -known  men  in 
California  died  yesterday  in  a  squalid  hut  on 
Colfax  Street.  He  was  Prof.  Herman  Kottin- 
ger,  who  at  one  time  was  the  leading  violinist 


310  WHITE   SLAVES 

on  the  Pacific  Coast,  and  well  known  as  a 
writer  of  prose  and  poetry,  of  '  A  World's 
History,'  and  also  of  text-books  on  free  thought. 
He  was  worth  hundreds  of  thousands  of  dollars, 
acquired  by  a  lifetime  of  miserly  frugality.  At 
the  time  of  his  death  sixteen  hundred  dollars 
in  gold  coin  was  found  secreted  in  his  bed. 
But  one  child,  William  Kottinger,  a  farmer, 
was  present  at  the  death.  When  the  old  man 
in  his  death-throes  raised  himself  up  in  bed, 
the  son  rushed  to  his  side.  His  father,  mistak- 
ing the  act,  with  a  frenzied  yell  waved  him 
back,  and  clutching  at  the  bedclothes,  pulled 
them  back,  disclosing  to  view  the  gold.  He 
made  a  grab  at  it  with  both  hands,  and  with 
the  bright  pieces  in  his  fingers  fell  back  with 
a  gasp  and  expired. 

"  Prof.  Kottinger  was  once  a  doctor  in 
Heidelberg  University,  and  was  ninety  years 
old.  He  was  so  wasted  by  hunger  that  his 
body  weighed  less  than  forty  pounds,  and  was 
in  a  disgusting  condition.  His  bed  and  clothes 
were  reeking  with  filth.  Over  the  head  of  the. 
bed  hung  a  violin  of  great  value.  So  miserly 
was  the  old  professor  that  fifteen  years  ago  he 


THE   GOLD   GOD   OF   MODERN   SOCIETY      311 

drove  his  wife  and  all  his  children  from  home, 
saying  that  it  cost  too  much  to  feed  and  clothe 
them.  From  that  day  until  yesterday,  when 
the  end  was  approaching,  not  one  of  his  rela- 
tives had  come  near  him.  Two  big  fierce 
Danish  mastiffs,  half  starved,  have  for  years 
been  the  old  man's  only  companions,  and  they 
guarded  the  shanty  so  well  that  not  even  a 
tax-collector  could  approach.  They  had  to  be 
killed  yesterday  before  the  undertaker  could 
get  into  the  house.  When  it  was  learned  that 
Kottinger  was  dead,  a  number  of  his  relatives 
hastened  to  his  hut.  There  has  been  a  shame- 
ful neglect  of  the  dead  shown,  and  indecent 
haste  in  ransacking  the  place  in  search  of  the 
gold  and  other  treasures  known  to  be  hidden." 

All  these  show  the  destructive  power  of  gold 
upon  its  worshippers.  But  these  are  by  no 
means  the  only  victims  of  this  worship  of  the 
gold  god.  For  every  one  who  is  hoarding  up 
his  millions,  and  who  is  dominated  by  the  love 
of  gold  for  its  very  shine  and  glitter,  there  are 
hundreds  and  thousands  who  are  toiling  for 
insufficient  wages,  and  are  suffering  in  poverty 
and  want,  that  this  lordly  worshipper  may  pay 
his  devotions  to  the  money  god. 


312 


WHITE    SLAVES 


If  some  of  these  money  kings  who  have 
made  their  millions  by  the  oppression  of  the 
poor,  in  mines,  and  mills,  and  factories,  were 
suddenly  called  to  face  the  bones  of  the  dead 


DIGGING  IN   THE   ASH-BARRELS   IN   WINTER. 

who  have  gone  to  their  graves  from  weary, 
unrequited  slavery,  in  order  for  their  financial 
triumph,  they  would  stand  back  aghast  at  the 
price  of  their  own  success. 

It  is  this  worship  of  the  gold  god  which  is  at 


THE   GOLD    GOD    OF   MODERN    SOCIETY      313 

the  bottom  of  all  the  wrongs  which  have  been 
pointed  out  in  this  series  of  discourses.  The 
wealthy  merchant  who  pays  the  poor  widow 
one  cent  apiece  for  making  white  aprons,  and 
by  his  avarice  and  his  lust  induces  the  young 
women  who  sell  them  to  eke  out  their  scanty 
wages  by  the  sale  of  their  honor,  is  a  worshipper 
of  the  gold  god.  The  sweater  who  parcels  out 
his  work  through  the  miserable  tenement  houses, 
grinding  the  face  of  the  poor  to  the  very  last 
degree  possible  with  physical  existence,  —  in- 
deed, many  times  beyond  the  possibility  of 
existence,  except  when  helped  by  charity,  —  is 
an  obsequious  devotee  at  the  altar  of  Mammon. 
The  chattel-mortgage  shark,  who  watches  all 
the  necessities  of  the  poor  as  anxiously  as  ever 
a  hawk  watched  over  a  helpless  or  crippled 
bird,  and  the  liquor-seller,  who  fills  his  coffers 
by  a  traffic  which  injures  and  destroys  the 
health,  the  intelligence,  and  the  morality  of 
all  the  people  whom  he  can  draw  into  his  net, 
investing  all  his  cunning  in  methods  to  entrap 
the  unwary,  and  gloating  over  the  increas- 
ing appetite  and  the  devilish  passion  for  strong 
drink  in  his  victims,  are  only  brothers  to  the 


314 


WHITE   SLAVES 


others  who  gather  to  pay  their  devotions  to  the 
god  of  gold. 

If  we  do  not  approve  these  worshippers,  what 
shall  we  say  of  ourselves  for  permitting  this  state 


FOUR   SHINERS. 


of  things  to  come  to  pass?  It  is  inconsistent  to 
condemn  the  liquor-seller  and  honor  the  city 
which  licenses  him  to  do  his  damnable  work. 
It  is  impossible  to  condemn  the  sweater  and 
retain  your  respect  for  the  public  which  permits 
him  to  carry  on  his  nefarious  business.  The 


THE   GOLD    GOD    OP    MODERN  SOCIETY      315 

spirit  of  avarice  is  in  the  very  air,  until  so- 
ciety has  been  poisoned  by  its  breath.  Dr. 
Howard  Crosby,  writing  in  the  Forum  a  few 
years  since,  says  :  "  The  healthiest  form  of 
human  society  is  where  the  many  are  equally 
independent  in  their  management  of  their 
affairs,  where  professions  and  trades  are  repre- 
sented by  individual  thinking  minds,  and  where 
those  engaged  in  any  one  branch  of  industry 
stand  on  a  level  with  one  another.  This  con- 
dition of  things  promotes  invention,  activity, 
interest,  manliness,  and  good  citizenship.  Now 
the  gold-hunt  system  is  directly  antagonistic  to 
all  this.  It  seeks  to  destroy  the  many  inde- 
pendent tradesmen,  and  to  make  them  servants 
in  a  gigantic  monopoly.  The  happy  homes  of 
freemen  become  the  pinched  quarters  of  serfs. 
The  lords  of  trade  have  their  hundreds^  and 
thousands  of  humble  subordinates  over  whom 
they  rule,  often  with  a  rod  of  iron.  They 
may  be  turned  away  from  work  and  wages 
at  any  moment,  by  any  whim  of  the  selfish 
employer.  Hence,  through  fear  of  this,  they 
lose  their  manhood,  and  dare  not  assert  even  a 
decision  of  their  conscience.  There  is  no  more 


316  WHITE    SLAVES 

melancholy  sight  to  my  eyes  than  that  which  I 
often  see  nowadays  —  the  former  happy  pos- 
sessor of  a  shop  or  store,  who  has  lived  com- 
fortably and  with  the  true  nobility  of  a  citizen, 
and  whose  family  have  felt  the  dignity  of  the 
home,  now  made  a  clerk  and  drudge  in  a  huge 
establishment  that,  by  its  relentless  use  of 
millions,  has  undermined  and  overthrown  all 
the  independent  stores  of  a  large  district,  while 
his  family  are  thrust  into  the  unsavory  com- 
munism of  a  tenement  house,  and  lose  all  the 
delicate  refinements  of  a  quiet  home.  It  is 
easy  to  say  that  this  is  but  the  natural  law  of 
trade.  So  to  devour  men  is  the  natural  law 
of  tigers.  But  this  truth  will  not  reconcile  us 
to  the  process.  If  we  are  to  stop  men  from 
stealing  directly,  we  can  stop  them  from  steal- 
ing indirectly.  If  natural  law  works  evil  to 
the  community,  we  are  to  make  statute  law, 
which  will  act  as  supernatural  law,  and  control 
the  offensive  principle.  Unless  we  wish  our 
social  equality  destroyed,  and  a  system  of  prac- 
tical serfdom  to  take  its  place,  we  must  put  a 
limit  to  the  acts  of  greed,  and  so  preserve  the 
independence  of  our  citizens." 


THE   GOLD    GOD    OF   MODERN    SOCIETY      317 

V 

Every  thoughtful  observer  of  the  "signs  of 
the  times "  knows  that  the  deepest  problem 
of  our  age  is  the  amicable  solution  of  the 
struggle  between  labor  and  capital.  Some  of 


SOUTH  BOSTON    KAG-F1CKEKS. 

the  ablest  work  done  in  literature,  in  our 
time,  has  been  produced  out  of  an  earnest 
desire  to  abolish  the  more  recent  types  of  this 
white  slavery,  which  has,  in  one  form  or  another, 
threatened  the  masses  since  the  days  of  old 
John  Ball  of  early  England.  Perhaps  the 


318  WHITE   SLAVES 

strongest  portrayal,  yet,  of  many  phases  of  the 
question,  especially  those  relating  to  the  city, 
may  be  found  in  Mr.  Howells'  story,  "  A  Hazard 
of  New  Fortunes."  For  the  country,  if  one 
really  wants  to  see  what  is  behind  the  great 
upheaval  in  the  West,  which  has  its  outward 
manifestation  in  the  Farmers'  Alliance,  he  only 
needs  to  read  Mr.  Hamlin  Garland's  "Main 
Travelled  Roads." 

In  the  meantime  most  of  us  are  asking, 
"  What  is  the  way  out  ? "  As  for  myself,  I 
confess  to  being  only  a  student.  I  have  no 
word  of  sneer  or  scoff  for  any  man's  honest  think- 
ing, who  is  sincerely  trying  to  uplift  his  brothers 
and  sisters ;  and  yet  I  must  say  that,  as  yet,  I 
have  not  been  able  to  become  a  disciple  of  any 
of  the  new  systems  that  have  been  presented. 
I  feel  something  like  the  man  who  says,  "  There 
are  good  things  to  be  said  in  praise  of  Social- 
ism or  Nationalism,  as  compared  with  the  crush- 
ing and  wearing  methods  of  competition ;  but 
what  the  world  is  waiting  for  is  the  thinker  who 
shall  either  show  us  how  to  reconcile  the  new 
system  with  human  liberty,  or  else  convince  us 
that  we  can  do  without  liberty."  In  the  mean- 


THE   GOLD   GOD   OF   MODERN   SOCIETY      319 

time  I  believe  in  God,  in  His  wise  purpose  in 
the  creation  of  the  world,  in  His  providential 
care  over  it,  and  that  under  His  grace  there 
shall  come  the  triumph  of  righteousness  in  it. 
I  believe  in  Jesus  Christ.  To  my  mind,  Chris- 
tianity stands  to-day  very  much  as  it  did  nearly 
two  thousand  years  ago,  when  Jesus  hung  upon 
the  cross  between  two  thieves.  The  anarchy 
which,  atheistic  and  reckless,  would  destroy  all 
law  and  all  property,  is  one  of  the  thieves,  and 
the  devotee  of  the  gold  god  of  our  time,  who 
clutches  his  money-bags  and  says,  "I  have  a 
right  to  get  all  the  money  I  can,  and  do  with  it 
what  I  please,"  is  the  other  thief.  Christianity 
stands  between  them ;  her  mission  is  to  change 
them  both,  and  bring  them  with  a  regenerated 
purpose  into  brotherhood  and  fellowship. 

George  Macdonald  says :  "  The  world  will 
change  only  as  the  heart  of  man  changes. 
Growing  intellect,  growing  civilization,  will  heal 
man's  wounds  only  to  cause  the  deeper  ill  to 
break  out  afresh  in  new  forms,  nor  can  they 
satisfy  one  longing  of  the  human  soul.  Its  de- 
sires are  deeper  than  that  soul  itself,  whence 
it  groans  with  the  groanings  that  cannot  be 


320  WHITE    SLAVES 

uttered.  As  much  in  times  of  civilization  as  in 
those  of  barbarity,  the  soul  needs  an  external 
presence  to  make  its  life  good  to  it."  The  Chris- 
tianity of  to-day  must  set  itself,  as  did  Jesus,  to 
make  men  brothers,  by  bringing  them  to  a  recog- 
nition of  the  fact  that  they  are  all  alike  the  chil- 
dren of  one  God  and  Father  over  all.  Such  a 
Christianity  will  necessarily  be  at  war  with  the 
gold  god  of  our  time.  The  clear-cut  declaration 
of  Jesus,  "  Ye  cannot  serve  God  and  Mammon," 
is  as  true  now  as  when  He  uttered  it.  I  do  not 
remember  to  have  seen  this  issue  put  as  clearly 
anywhere  else  as  by  Henry  D.  Lloyd  in  an 
article  in  the  North  American  Review  entitled, 
"  The  New  Conscience."  He  says :  Let  us 
listen  while  a  delegation  from  the  Money-power 
remonstrates  with  the  New  Conscience  for  its 
unreasonable  sentiments  and  ideas.  Here  they 
come,  one  by  one,  and  range  themselves  about. 
First  speaks  — 

THE  MERCHANT  PRINCE  :  I  have  a  right  to 
buy  where  I  can  buy  cheapest. 

CONSCIENCE:  See  these  little  stunted,  hol- 
low-eyed girls  coming  out  of  that  factory. 

LAWYER  :  Wages  are  settled  by  contract. 


THE    GOLD    GOD   OF   MODERN    SOCIETY      321 

CONSCIENCE:  Where  can  I  find  white-haired 
workingmen  ? 

CAPITALIST:  Every  man  has  a  right  to  do 
what  he  will  with  his  own. 

CONSCIENCE  :  What  is  the  price  of  a  senator- 
ship  to-day? 

STATISTICIAN:  Never  were  food,  fuel,  and 
clothing  so  cheap. 

CONSCIENCE  :  Little  Mary  Mitchell  works  in 
Waterbury's  ropeworks  five  days  a  week  from 
six  in  the  evening  till  six  in  the  morning. 

RAILROAD  KING:  Every  man  makes  his 
own  career.  I  was  a  workingman  myself 
twenty  years  ago,  and  now  I  keep  a  carriage,  a 
butler,  and  several  judges  and  legislators,  in 
four  States,  and  — 

CONSCIENCE:  That  tired-looking  man  is  a 
railway  conductor  of  a  company  owned  by  half 
a  dozen  men  worth  three  hundred  millions  of 
dollars,  which  is  not  enough  for  them,  so  they 
squeeze  a  few  more  dollars  a  month  out  of  him 
by  making  him,  on  every  alternate  trip,  do 
twenty-eight  and  a  half  hours'  work  without 
sleep. 

BANKER:  Our  wealth  is  increasing  one  bill- 


322  WHITE   SLAVES 

ion  dollars  a  year.  We  have  boards  of  trades, 
the  best  railroads  in  the  world,  and  packing- 
houses that  can  kill  ten  thousand  hogs. 

CONSCIENCE  :  The  sickening  stench,  the  blis- 
tered air,  the  foul  sights  of  the  tenements, 
and  the  motherhood  and  the  childhood  choking 
there. 

CONSERVATIVE  :  This  is  the  best  government 
in  the  world.  America  is  good  enough  for  me. 

CONSCIENCE:  Listen  to  that  " tramp,  tramp, 
tramp  "  of  a  million  of  men  out  of  work. 

MANUFACTURER:  Without  this  system  of 
industry  the  subjugation  of  North  America  to 
civilization  would  have  been  impossible ;  we 
could  never  have  shown  the  world  the  magnifi- 
cent spectacle  of  - 

CONSCIENCE  :  There  is  a  little  boy  standing 
ten  hours  a  day  up  to  his  ankles  in  the  water  in 
a  coal-mine. 

COAL  MONOPOLIST:  I  have  a  statistician 
who  can  prove  —  he  can  prove  anything  —  that 
the  workingman  is  a  great  deal  better  off  than 
he  ever  was,  that  he  makes  more  than  I  do,  that 
small  incomes  are  increasing  and  large  ones 
decreasing,  that  there  is  no  involuntary  poverty, 


THE   GOLD    GOD    OF    MODERN    SOCIETY      323 

and  that  the  workingmen  could  live  on  twenty- 
five  cents  each  a  day  and  buy  up  the  United 
States  with  their  savings,  and  — 

CONSCIENCE  :  How  long  shall  it  be  cheaper 
to  run  over  workingmen  and  women  at  the 
railroad  crossings  in  the  cities  than  to  put  up 
gates  ? 

CLERGYMAN  :  The  poor  we  are  to  have  with 
us  always. 

CONSCIENCE  :  That  sewing-woman  you  see 
pawning  her  shawl  has  lived  this  winter  with 
her  two  children  in  a  room  without  fire.  Are 
you  wearing  one  of  the  shirts  she  finished  ? 

STATESMAN  :  The  workingman  has  the  bal- 
lot and  the  newspapers.  He  is  a  free  citizen. 

CONSCIENCE:  As  the  nights  grow  colder 
see  how  the  number  of  girls  on  the  street 
increases. 

It  is  this  new  conscience,  the  conscience  of 
Jesus  Christ,  that  appraises  a  hungry  child  to 
be  of  more  value  than  ten  thousand  palaces, 
that  must  animate  and  dominate  the  church  that 
is  called  by  His  name,  in  its  war  against  the 
gold  god  of  modern  society. 

You  may  find  this   conscience  throbbing  in 


324  WHITE    SLAVES 

Ella  Wheeler  Wilcox's  plea  for  "  Justice,  not 
Charity." 

"  All  hail  the  dawn  of  a  new  day  breaking, 

When  a  strong  armed  nation  shall  take  away 
The  weary  burden  from  backs  that  are  aching 
With  maximum  work  and  minimum  pay. 

When  no  man  is  honored  who  hoards  his  millions, 
When  no  man  feasts  on  another's  toil, 

And  God's  poor,  suffering,  starving  billions 
Shall  share  His  riches  of  sun  and  soil. 

There  is  gold  for  all  in  the  world's  broad  bosom, 
There  is  food  for  all  in  the  world's  great  store; 

Enough  is  provided  if  rightly  divided, 
Let  each  man  take  what  he  needs  —  no  more. 

Shame  on  the  miser  with  unused  riches, 
Who  robs  the  toiler  to  swell  his  hoard, 

Who  beats  down  the  wage  of  the  digger  of  ditches, 
And  steals  the  bread  from  the  poor  man's  board! 

Shame  on  the  owner  of  mines  whose  cruel 
And  selfish  measures  have  brought  him  wealth! 

While  the  ragged  wretches  who  dig  his  fuel 
Are  robbed  of  comfort,  and  hope,  and  health. 

Shame  on  the  ruler  who  rides  in  his  carriage, 
Bought  by  the  labor  of  half-paid  men  — 

Men  who  are  shut  out  of  home  and  marriage, 
And  are  herded  like  sheep  in  a  hovel  pen." 

There  must  be  no  doubt  about  the  attitude 
of  the  church  in  a  time  like  this.     Against  the 


THE   GOLD   GOD   OF   MODERN   SOCIETY      325 

gold  god  and  all  his  oppressions  the  Christian 
Church  must  stand  with  an  unflinching  front. 
Our  God  is  the  same  who  spoke  through  the 
voice  of  Amos  of  old,  saying,  "  Hear  this,  oh 
ye  that  swallow  up  the  needy,  even  to  make 
the  poor  of  the  land  to  fail,  saying,  When  will 
the  new  moon  be  gone,  that  we  may  sell  corn  ? 
And  the  sabbath,  that  we  may  set  forth  wheat, 
making  the  ephah  small,  and  the  shekel  great, 
and  falsifying  the  balances  by  deceit?  That 
we  may  buy  the  poor  for  silver,  and  the  needy 
for  a  pair  of  shoes ;  yea,  and  sell  the  refuse  of 
the  wheat?  "  Ah!  how  much  that  sounds  like 
the  things  that  are  going  on  at  the  present 
time !  Yet  listen  to  the  oath  of  the  Almighty 
as  He  looks  on  such  things :  "  The  Lord  hath 
sworn  by  the  excellency  of  Jacob,  Surely  I  will 
never  forget  any  of  their  works.  Shall  not  the 
land  tremble  for  this,  and  every  one  mourn  that 
dwelleth  therein  ?  .  .  .  And  it  shall  come  to 
pass  in  that  day,  saith  the  Lord  God,  that  I  will 
cause  the  sun  to  go  down  at  noon,  and  I  will 
darken  the  earth  in  a  clear  day  :  and  I  will  turn 
your  feasts  into  mourning,  and  all  your  songs 
into  lamentation ;  and  I  will  bring  up  sack- 


326  WHITE    SLAVES 

cloth  upon  all  loins,  and  baldness  upon  every 
head;  and  I  will  make  it  as  the  mourning  of 
an  only  son,  and  the  end  thereof  as  a  bitter 
day." 

It  is  the  mission  of  our  blessed  Christianity 
to  save  the  world  from  that  bitter  day  by  so 
changing  and  transforming  it  that  it  will  no 
longer  deserve  bitterness,  but  peace,  at  the 
hand  of  God.  Although  I  have  felt  compelled, 
in  this  series  of  discourses,  to  uncover  many 
dark  and  loathsome  places  in  our  social  system, 
yet  I  am  no  pessimist,  and  I  do  not  despair. 
Jesus  Christ,  our  Captain,  saw  "  Satan  fallen  as 
lightning  from  heaven ; "  and  when  we  are  as 
devoted  to  God,  and  as  thoroughly  consecrated 
to  our  mission  of  curing  the  world's  heartache 
as  was  He,  we,  too,  shall  live  in  sight  of  the 
same  glorious  triumph.  When  we  are  imbued 
with  this  faith,  and  exalted  into  fellowship  with 
Him,  we  will  not  dare  to  say  that  the  sweat- 
shop, or  the  neglected  tenement  house,  or  the 
noisome  liquor  saloon,  is  a  necessary  contin- 
gent of  human  life.  And  we  will  know  that 
whatever  is  good  enough  to  be  true,  may  be 
and  shall  be  true  to  the  sons  and  daughters  of 


THE   GOLD   GOD   OF   MODERN   SOCIETY      327 

God.      In  that  faith  we  shall  be  able  to  sing 
with  the  poet:  — 

"  'Tis  coming  up  the  steeps  of  time, 

And  this  old  world  is  growing  brighter; 
We  may  not  see  its  dawn  sublime, 
Yet  high  hopes  make  the  heart  throb  lighter! 

We  may  be  sleeping  in  the  ground, 
When  it  awakes  the  peoples'  wonder; 

But  we  have  felt  it  gathering  round, 
And  heard  its  voice  of  living  thunder; 
Christ's  reign,  ah,  yes,  'tis  coining! 

Aye,  it  must  come  !  the  Tyrant's  throne 
Is  crumbling,  with  men's  hot  tears  rusted; 

The  sword  earth's  mighty  have  leant  upon 
Is  cankered,  with  men's  hearts'  blood  crusted! 

Room  !  for  the  man  of  love  make  way ! 

Ye  selfish  great  ones,  pause  no  longer; 
Ye  cannot  stay  the  opening  day, 

The  world  rolls  on,  the  light  grows  stronger  — 

The  Master's  advent's  coming!" 


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